What It Takes
iCrazy Interrupted
By Callie Oettinger | Published: August 10, 2012
The headline stared out from the magazine rack in the check-out line. Beyond the guess-which-celebrity-has-the-worst-beach-body headlines was:
iCrazy
Panic. Depression. Psychosis.
How Connection Addiction Is Rewiring Our Brains
It was splashed across the top of Newsweek.
* * *
In January, my husband and I bundled up our kids and headed skiing. The lodge where we ate lunch was the only place to plug-in during the day.
The first day I was a wreck. I needed to get online.
“You’re on vacation,” my husband reminded me. “People know you’re gone. It’s ok.”
That wasn’t the point. I needed to know what was going on. What was I missing out on?
And then it started to pass.
And by the end of the trip, I realized my head was clearing.
And I knew why.
The things missing during vacation—those things that ate up much of my usual day-to-day life—were e-mail and the Internet.
* * *
I found iCrazy by Tony Dokoupil sandwiched between pieces about Tom Cruise and Syria. It opened with the example of Jason Russell, the man behind the documentary “Kony 2012,” who went from little social presence to overload—to stripping down on a street corner, slapping the pavement and ranting.
* * *
I didn’t watch much TV as a kid. If chores were done and behavior good, Little House on the Prairie and Saturday cartoons were a treat.
My parents tuned in for the evening news, UCLA football and basketball, and the annual Army-Navy football game.
Otherwise, my sisters and I challenged our play station of the day—the jungle gym Dad erected in the back yard—or we torn up the neighborhood on our bikes, played sports, were involved in Girl Scouts, or hanging at the library, which Mom took us to once a week to pick out books to read. We didn’t have time for TV. No Atari. No computer.
* * *
Before our family ski trip this past January, I felt like my brain was atrophying. I couldn’t sit and read books like I used to. I moved like a cat who’d lost her patience. My focus was on getting that piece of string being wiggled in front of me, not on waiting out the string—and its manipulator—like a seasoned Tom, so I could grab it for good in just one pounce.
I was constantly checking, monitoring, replying, posting.
* * *
According to the Newsweek article:
“The brains of Internet addicts, it turns out, look like the brains of drug and alcohol addicts.”
* * *
I’m one of those people who can’t hold a conversation and watch TV at the same time. I’ve tried. Doesn’t work—even if the show is about something for which I have no interest. It draws me in. And I can’t produce anything when it’s on. I need silence.
That same feeling of being distracted started tugging at my brain a while ago, as I sat in front of my computer. For my work, I spend more time in front of a screen than I do anything else in my life.
And it hurts my head.
It’s not that pain, in a nasty hangover, hammering a nail into your brain sort of way, but more of that leaking pain in your heart sort of way—which comes about when you’re losing someone or something of great value. It just keeps going. No one to shore up the dike. Just a long, heart-wrenching, painful leak.
* * *
My dad’s a doc. When I had my own kids he started going on and on about limiting their screen time. For the first four years of my son’s life, I didn’t listen. He watched a lot of TV. And then my daughter came along, and we were busier than ever. My son was old enough to play sports, we were at soccer practices and games, and TV time faded.
And when we did have free time, and he started watching TV again, I noticed a difference. He wasn’t as calm. Didn’t sit as still. And then the Nintendo DS came along and the iTouch.
We’re a gadget family, so he and his sister bought into those, and then into the iPad, and then I noticed the same. After long periods in front of the many screens they were easily distracted.
I listened to Dad and started limiting their screen time. No TV, no DS, no computer, no iTouch, no iPad during the week. Weekends only.
It didn’t occur to me that I needed to limit my own screen time.
* * *
On the last page of the Newsweek article, a mention of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl made me pause:
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,” begins Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl, a beatnik rant that opens with people “dragging themselves” at dawn, searching for an “angry fix” of heroin. It’s not hard to imagine the alternative imagery today.
* * *
In the public relations world, there’s an attention to staying on top of everything, all the time. I live in it. I get it. If something bad happens, you need to be on top of it—right away. And if something good breaks, you want to blow your horn—loud, within seconds of the fab news.
BUT: That need to know has fueled the social media addiction. The latter services the former. It provides that quick-info-now fix.
AND: It’s expanded it’s territory. It’s hooking up more than just the PR world these days.
* * *
One last line from Newsweek:
The Internet is still ours to shape. Our minds are in the balance.
* * *
I’m still a fan of social media for sharing and connecting. I’ve met some amazing people that way, but I know I can’t be on board 24/7.
Get in.
Get out.
When I started limiting my social media time, my head felt better and I collected lost time—and I found that my time online was more rewarding. I accomplished more within the same time by limiting the distractions, keeping to my time limits. And I’ve extended it to e-mail, too. I’m either on, or off. No more having it turned on in the background all the time.
The feeling that my head is being invaded by the mush Dad said TV would turn my head into, is fading.
The thing is, I know I’m not alone in this.
As that last Newsweek line said, “The Internet is ours to shape.”
We’ve got to eliminate iCrazy from the equation.
“Our minds are in the balance.”
We can’t let the howling spread.
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The screens are an adjunct to the best action: spending the day with colleagues, striving, competing, contending, collaborating. Spending the evenings and weekends with family; wine, dining, strolling, laughing, chatting, cheering, planning. And time alone; running in the woods, tending the tomatoes, staring at the clouds, listening to the wind blowing in the trees, reading.
Ah, irony. I first noted this article on Facebook, and then spent long minutes reading it–on the ubiquitous screen, rather than gardening or writing in these early morning hours before iCrazy sets in from too much screen time. I now must promise myself to not continually check to see what other comments are posted about this fine article.
It’s a very serious matter.
We have invite internet to our lives in order to communicate, collect important information e.t.c.
But at the same time we understand that we have to learn (like the learner magician) how not to make it “our life”. If we don’t realize that, then we are slaves to addiction.
As a teacher I have to be extra careful when I see children reaching the limits of internet addiction or gaming addiction or TV addiction, not to mention of course the parents that don’t see the signs yet (or choose not to see them being busy with their works and financial problems e.t.c. Not to mention a very small percent of parents who feel secure knowing that their child is sitting quiet in front of the screen).
Love these thoughts and am wrestling with the tension of social media addiction constantly, especially as an author trying to “build my platform” through the very vehicle that can become all-consuming.
In the beginning, before there was GUI, there was The Word, all we had was text and slow modems, bulletin-board style dial-up networks, like ‘The Well’, one of the earliest and what ‘Wired Magazine’ named the most influential network in 1993. It was chock-full of burning-brains–writers, geeks, artists, unrepentant hippies, the constant sojourners on the continual path from Beat to Hippie to Punk to Grunge to Baby It’s A Brave New World. The print-outs I have from some of the conferences there are so rich, so open and generous of thought, manifesting in some of the key technologies and publications of what I now think of as Internet Hell.
The medium has devolved.
Where once I came online to escape the imprisonment of self — anonymity in a temporal world, free of visual context, able to interact on that same free plain, the Electronic Frontier, with others of like mind, where thought and patient communication replaced the noise and distraction of the meat-world — I now retreat from. It has become that which I sought to escape, all the yammering substanceless ‘information’, the crowds, and my God! high-school all over again, 24/7–it’s like being in the cafeteria at lunch time. And that was Zuckerberg’s model for ‘Facebook’–the high-school yearbook: a deep subject for such a shallow mind.
I quit all social media (except Twitter,) even my blog. As a writer for over thirty years, just because someone thinks they can write doesn’t make them a writer. The first umpteen years as ‘a writer’ I did what most of us did: lined shelves with rejection letters and re-typed dog-eared manuscripts to re-submit, ever hopeful that one of three always-in-circulation manuscripts would garner me an acceptance letter. Eventually one did, from P.J. O’Rourke, then-editor of ‘National Lampoon,’ and I felt like a ‘real writer.’ I never thought I’d say I miss magazine editors, but here we are online trying to curate’ our information–and that is called ‘editing’ imo. The law of entropy affect everything–that which is amassed has a tendency to break apart, and that which is in pieces tends to coalesce. Maybe that’s why magazines in all formats are a big deal again and self-publishing has a new image. Self-curation.
Remember the Internet is for surfing, not drowning.
Watch out for sharks.
And rip-tides.
Wait thirty minutes after eating before entering the current.
Oh my, did I need to read this, Callie!
I too have to battle ALL THOSE time-consuming, shallow Internet distractions. From my favorite online news sites, to product reviews of stuff I may or may not buy, to FB, to my favorite blogs, blah, blah, blah.
Seriously, thank you for the reminder. Because when I ease up, and go off the grid, I feel better. This is just the shove I needed.. THANK YOU!