D'vorahDavida
Yetzirah

(OMG. Ur going to hear a Luddite rant again... sry.)

Anyway, the article was about a book that had been written on the subject and we procured a copy... [using the internets... full disclosure.]

Here’s a photo:

[album 65561 The Shalllows.jpg]

Notice all the sticky notes.

It was a dense read. But worth it.

Now just to be clear, the man who wrote this book is no Luddite, as I will demonstrate in a minute. BUT in order for him to actually WRITE the book, he found that he needed to essentially unplug from the sound and fury of the internet’s siren call. He moved to Colorado with his wife and kept his online contacts to the barest minimum and got to work.

It is a fascinating piece of work. He goes into great detail about the neurobiology of the brain and how we process information. He also puts things into perspective by digging deep into history to describe other technologies that changed the way we relate to the world. It’s not that the technologies are wrong, or bad, but we just need to be honest and acknowledge that they DO change us. [There’s a particulary interesting story about Nietzsche and how he was able to continue to write despite his health problems because he started using the newly invented ball typewriter. He wrote to a friend, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”] His friend had noticed a change in Nietzsche’s writing style!

We have to decide if we LIKE those changes. I like to be conscious of what is happening to me, even if I do go forward into questionable territory.

One conclusion that is inescapable in my opinion is that the internet is not conducive to deep thought. The way things work there is a zoo of distraction and short attention span cacophony that our brains aren’t wired to handle. The section of the book that dealt with short and long term memory processes was the nail in the processor for me. It also gave me hope that books as we know them today may stay around for a long time to come.

He talks about something he calls ‘deep reading’. And along with that comes ‘deep thinking’. He found that when he was doing research as a writer, he could assimilate the information much better if he printed it out and read it from the hard copy, rather than off the computer. I can agree with this tactic. I print off essays that I receive in email form because I want to give them the attention they deserve and that cannot be accomplished reading from the screen.

It’s always been a love/hate relationship with computers for me, [click ‘first entry’ in the little menu box in the top left corner of this page]. [Also note that the ‘booklike’ thing I was wishing for has been created... the iPad..., which at first I had a powerful almost primal lust for when it first came out, but have since changed my mind. No offence to those who own one! ] And yes, I now have this Ferrari iMac, but I have to tell you, the bloom has gone off the motherboard. I won’t go into all the reasons I think the internet is ‘broken’. But I’ll give you one. The searches I used to do 3 or more years ago yielded much more satisfying results. Now they tend to be commercial, or recent, or the most popular results. None of which interest me most of the time! And I am getting more and more frustrated with finding the things that *I* am looking for.

However.

(Ah, the addict is about to speak.)

I acknowledge the wonderous ability to connect and and learn from people I will most likely never meet in person. I relish the opportunity to ‘publish’ my own work with the only intermediary being the fee I pay to pull onto the digital highway. My life has been enriched by those I have met here, much like old fashioned pen pals, we are sharing portions of our lives every day with each other.

But. I do all my deep reading and deep thinking when the whirring box is silent. And I never want to erode that capability. Now that I understand the mechanism of that deep reading, I will guard it jealously, and have taken up the habit of turning off the computer two days a week. One is on Shabbat and the other on Wednesdays. I’m weaning myself off little by little. I started by not turning it on till noon on Wednesday and yesterday made it until about 1 I think. My goal is to have a whole weekday away from the computer.

So I can think. Unplugged. Unfragmented. Undistracted.

I will end with the last paragraph from the book. I chose this because it illustrates that the man is not anti-computer. But he IS for conscious awareness of what is happening to us when we are online too much.

“As for me, I’m already backsliding. With the end of this book in sight, I’ve gone back to keeping my e-mail running all the time and I’ve jacked into my RSS feed again. I’ve been playing around with a few new social-networking services and have been posting some new entries to my blog. I recently broke down and bought a Blu-ray player with a built in Wi-Fi connection. It lets me stream music from Pandora, movies from Netflix and videos from YouTube through my television and stereo. I have to confess: it’s cool. I’m not sure I could live without it.”

Me? It’s cool, but costly. Both to my pocket book and my psyche. I keep a very wary eye on these gadgets of mine. And though I would miss our little chats here on Dear Diary, I know I could live without it. Because I lived before it.