I am addicted to checking e-mail, I’ll just admit it. It’s one of the last things I do before going to bed and one of the first things I do when I get up. I am occasionally guilty of greeting my computer before my kids and husband when I walk in the door. I recently got a smart-ish phone—it’s only as smart as its user, and in my case, that’s not saying much—so I'm never away from my e-mail for longer than a gym workout. I curse all those texters on the road, but I’m ashamed to admit that I am guilty of occasionally checking my e-mail at a stop light. (This is one of the biggest reasons I avoid Facebook. Another addiction—and an additional 800 friends to keep up with—is not what I need.)
I’ve never been much of a shopper, so surfing the web for deals doesn’t hold much appeal for me. I rarely download or upload anything. I google things here and there as I need to, but it’s really e-mail that’s the draw of the Internet for me. Connecting with people is what I do. And if I’m honest, it also feeds my need to feel important, needed, included. That’s why this paragraph from The Shallows felt familiar to me:
"Because we’re often using our computers in a social context, to converse with friends or colleagues, to create ‘profiles’ of ourselves, to broadcast our thoughts through blog posts or Facebook updates, our social standing is, in one way or another, always in play, always at risk. The resulting self-consciousness—even, at times, fear—magnifies the intensity of our involvement with the medium. That’s true for everyone, but it’s particularly true for the young, who tend to be compulsive in using their phones and computers for texting and instant messaging. . . . If they stop sending messages, they risk becoming invisible.”
It doesn’t take much for a stay-at-home mom who now only dabbles in work remotely to feel socially invisible. But is habitual texting, Facebooking, and e-mailing the way I want to solve this?
Author Nicholas Carr argues that the Net makes us hungry, and the more we feed our brains with it, the hungrier we get. (Sounds like addiction, eh?) In the process, our minds get busier and busier, our to-do lists longer and longer. I find myself composing e-mails in my sleep and waking up to a list of 15 messages I need to send before I can even get out the cereal or open my Bible.
In the 1950s, some accidental prophet named Martin Heidegger wrote that “the frenziedness of technology threatens to entrench itself everywhere.” (And this was in the ’50s, for Pete’s sake!) Nicholas Carr ends The Shallows by saying, “It may be that we are now entering the final stage of that entrenchment. We are welcoming the frenziedness into our souls.”
I feel it in my soul. Do you?
