Breaking the Addiction

            Last semester I wrote a 17-page paper about the benefits of technology, mainly social media. I argued for how social media can enhance classroom learning if used properly and in moderation. I raised points about how technology has bridged otherwise unbridgeable gaps in geography. I pursued the idea that it enhances the ability for people to connect and relate. For 17 pages I went on about how great social media and technology is. Only thing is, now I’m not sure I’d agree with myself. Yes, technology is good, and advancements in it have allowed for global connectivity and advancements in science that prolong the average life span and enable us to research the depths of the sea and outer space. I’m not here to say all technology is bad. But I think that we as a society have reached a point of near crisis in our abuse of technology. I’ve never before been an advocate for this side of the argument, but over the past few months I’ve found myself growing more and more infuriated with our use of technology and social media. We’ve become a culture addicted to at-your-fingertips ease of access to nearly anything we need. Don’t know what a word means, google it on you iPhone. Someone said something funny, tweet it quick before you forget. You climbed to the top of a mountain and saw a magnificent sunset, instagram it because pictures or it didn’t happen. We’re addicted to a virtual world and we’ve become more invested in how many likes we can get on a picture than the actual issues of the world.
            The only problem with my argument against technology is that I’m just as much to blame as the next guy. I am addicted to my phone and to social media. Whenever I’m in public and I start to feel awkward, I turn to my phone. Whenever I’m bored, I turn to my phone. It’s even gotten to the point that if I get a notification on my phone while I’m in the middle of a conversation with someone I’ll take my eyes off of them and turn them to my phone. I will literally engage with social media when I am with another person. I scroll through my twitter feed and my instagram feed only to see the same pictures I looked at when I checked it five minutes ago. I read through Facebook posts and take the most pointless quizzes on BuzzFeed thinking I’ll somehow realize my true identity if I know which Grey’s Anatomy character I am. I check to see every single person who’s looked at my Snapchat story to make sure the right people saw it. I one time literally sat with my friend and forced her to snap me back and forth hundreds of time just to get my score to go up (even though what even is the point of a score?!?) I scroll through Timehop just to see what I was up to on social media 1, 2, 3, 4+ years ago. It’s like social media-ception. I cannot escape it, and worse, I cannot escape my addiction to it. I’ll admit to feeling a sort of emptiness if my instagram picture doesn’t get what society deems as “enough likes.” I’ll admit to posting things on Twitter to get someone’s attention, or sub tweeting about someone when I’m mad at them. I’ll admit to having felt a certain high when I reached and then exceed 1,000 friends on Facebook. I am addicted, and I turn to social media thinking I’ll somehow find myself.

            But what are 1,000 friends on Facebook if I don’t invest in my real life friendships and relationships. What is 70 likes on a instagram if I’m not striving to be a better, more patient and more loving person. All of these numbers are meaningless, really, and it makes me sick to think how much stock people put in them, how much stock I put in them. There is no greater value than that of knowing—truly knowing—another person. And we’ve become a culture so engrossed in our screens that we think we know a person based solely on what they post. We judge, we criticize; we jump to conclusions about people based on the most superficial things. We spend more time a day on our phones than we do engaging in real life, face-to-face conversations. And we turn to technology as a shield to hide behind when we have to talk to someone about something serious or vulnerable. I am not free from these claims. I’m only a perpetuator of the problem.

            I first started to realize my issue when I got back from Haiti this year. After nearly 10 days of not looking at my phone I opened my texting to let my friends and family know I had landed safely back in the states. The keyboard looked foreign, my fingers forgot how to move across the screen that they had once known how to do so effortlessly. I felt like I was using an iPhone for the first time. By the time I was back in the states for about a week I found myself growing tired of the constant need for connection and the dependency I had on my phone. Being very OCD and type A I need to stay on top of things or I fall subject to unhealthy and uncontrollable amounts of anxiety. One way to combat this is to know my schedule, but in order to do so I need to see my google calendar; I need to make sure I get emails and texts the moment they’re sent, I need to stay on top of the ever-changing structure of the day. I hate that everything I need to know is primarily found and communicated through technology. But regardless I can choose to break away from that need. I made it just fine in Haiti without my phone, and I can make it just fine here without using it nearly as much.

            I started to realize the larger problem with technology when I was babysitting a few weeks back. I babysit 3 kids, a 15-year-old, a 10-year-old, and an 8-year-old. The 8-year-old is addicted to his parent’s iPads (yes, multiple iPads). The minute he gets home from school he runs to it. I pry him away only long enough for him to do his homework sheet, and then he’s right back to it. On the nicer days I do everything I can to get him to play outside, but he always puts up a fight arguing just “five more minutes” on the iPad. I can’t stand it. He’s 8-years-old and his primary source of entertainment is found on a screen. What happened to digging for worms and reading books and playing with Play-Doh and building forts? There is something fundamentally wrong with the amount of exposure kids today have to technology.

            In case you missed it, the Apple Watch is here, allowing users to do everything they could already do with their iPhone but in a smaller scale and literally right on their wrist. I really do not understand the Apple Watch if I’m being completely honest. Why would you need a watch to do anything more than tell the time, set an alarm, and maybe have a stopwatch feature? I’ll tell ya, I’ve been using this little $30 Timex watch for the past two years and it’s waterproof and sweat proof and survived two grueling trips to Haiti. It tells me the time and the date and works as an alarm and has a stopwatch feature for timing runs. Heck, it does everything I’ll ever need a watch to do. But somehow society has moved into an age where an iPhone and MacBook aren’t enough. Now we need a smaller iPhone strapped on our wrist. But the Apple Watch serves literally no function if you don’t have an iPhone to pair it to, which is also pretty crazy because then you’ll actually have two of the exact same devices that are completely co-dependent on one another. So in case the iPhone you carry around with you in your back pocket isn’t convenient enough you’ll now have the same exact abilities right on your wrist.

            I understand that I’m a hypocrite for all of this, I mean, come on, I’m posting about it on my ONLINE blog…it doesn’t get much more hypocritical than that. But let me reiterate. I love technology. I love being able to use my laptop to research and write papers. I love having my phone so I can call my parents no matter where in the world I am. And I’m not even trying to say social media sites in and of themselves are bad. What is going causing problems, though, is the way I abuse them and try and find my identity in them. I rely so heavily on technology, constant connection, and social media that I’ll risk walking right into someone on my way to class just so it looks like I’m texting someone so I feel a little less isolated. I feel a little boost of confidence every time my instagram gets more likes than someone else’s and I felt like I’d finally made it when I had Facebook friends in the thousands. I want to end my addiction. So here’s what I’m going to (try my very best) to do:

1.     NEVER look at my phone when I’m talking to someone else

2.     Limit my social media browsing to twice a day

3.     Spend at least an hour a day removed from my phone and laptop (that means no emails, no texts, no homework that is computer based, nothing)

4.     Avoid using my phone to fill a social anxiety void when I’m standing alone in a room full of people

5.     Save important conversations for face-to-face and never hide behind a text because it’s easier and less scary

This is just a start, but I’m hoping it’ll allow me to develop disciplines that will ground me more in reality and less in the virtual world we’re headed for.

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