Digital Detoxification

~why do we like getting SQUARE EYES?~

The digital medium has become an end in and of itself, as opposed to a means to an end. Digital has become the new crack! I mean to make my readers feel uncomfortable with that comparison. It seems the vast majority of people find themselves unable to refrain from texting, facebooking, kindle-ing, ipod-ing, gaming, or internet surfing. Downloading, uploading, hacking, have all become part of our language. Google, the name of a prominent company, has now become a verb. And then we have Twitter and tweet. Tweeting has gone from a noise a bird makes to a text-based post of 140 characters or less, that millions of people make on a site called Twitter.

I'll admit, at first I got sucked in ~ monkey see, monkey do ~ and tried the Twitter thing. I really have a difficult time understanding its purpose/point. I've come to see it as the tool of narcissists. Who else would presume to think that anyone really gives a f#ck what they're eating for dinner, wearing, or doing at this precise moment?! The internet has almost become its own entity. Strangely, I came across the following quote, the other day on Criminal Minds,

The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had. ~ Eric Schmidt

I like the descriptor anarchy. Law enforcement finds it difficult to enforce any semblance of law on the internet. Hence, its transformed itself into a hunting ground. This year I endured the imposition of a digital moratorium, whilst in drug addiction treatment. For the first three weeks in July, I experienced a sort of cloister from the world at large. For the remainder of the 5 months, I lived without a cell phone and without internet access.

 image by Jules2445

Now that I'm back to living on the "outside" I have more awareness of how obssessed we can all get with the internet and cell phones ~ with texting, with tweeting, and with facebooking. I have decided to give myself a digital detox of sorts. First, I deleted my Twitter account. Then I trimmed away from Facebook any of my [drug] using friends. Then I reduced the number of blogs I follow to 30. My life has more balance now, on the other side of treatment. I don't miss Twitter, I have a very simple cell phone. And I like it this way.