Anthropologist Victor Turner writes that we are most free to explore identity in places outside of our normal routines, places that are in some way “betwixt and between.” Turner calls them liminal, from the Latin word for “threshold.
In games, he feels that he is “creating something new.” But this is creation where someone has already been. It is not creation but the FEELING of creation. These are feelings of accomplishment on a time scale and with a certainty that the real world cannot provide.
Instead of thinking about addiction, it makes sense to confront this reality: We are faced with technologies to which we are extremely vulnerable and we don’t always respect that fact. The path forward is to learn more about our vulnerabilities. Then, we can design technology and the environments in which we use them with these insights in mind. For example, since we know that multitasking is seductive but not helpful to learning, it’s up to us to promote “unitasking.
We have to love technology enough to describe it accurately. And we have to love ourselves enough to confront technology’s true effect on us.
Anxieties migrate, proliferate.
The director of one of the nursing homes I have studied said, “We do not become children as we age. But because dependency can look childlike, we too often treat the elderly as though this were the case.
Loneliness is painful, emotionally and even physically, born from a “want of intimacy” when we need it most, in early childhood. Solitude – the capacity to be contentedly and constructively alone – is built from successful human connection at just that time.
Overwhelmed by the volume and velocity of our lives, we turn to technology to help us find time. But technology makes us busier than ever and ever more in search of retreat. Gradually, we come to see our online life as life itself.
Who says that we always have to be ready to communicate?
Research tells us that being comfortable with our vulnerabilities is central to our happiness, our creativity, and even our productivity.
Online life is about premeditation.
If you don’t learn how to be alone, you’ll always be lonely, loneliness is failed solitude.
Increasingly, people feel as though they must have a reason for taking time alone, a reason not to be available.
Talking on a landline with no interruptions used to be an everyday thing. Now it’s exotic; the jewel in the crown.
We cannot all write like Lincoln or Shakespeare, but even the least gifted of us has the incredible instrument, our voice, to communicate the range of human emotions. Why would we deprive ourselves of that?
We are so accustomed to being always connected that being alone seems like a problem technology should solve. And.
The desire for the edited life crosses generations, but the young consider it their birthright.
The answer: Multitasking will not bring greater value. You will feel you are achieving more and more as you accomplish less and less. You will be asked, outright, “Why go through the anxiety of separating from all of your connections to focus on the small group you are with?” The answer: The more you talk to your colleagues, the greater your productivity.
The computer offered the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.
As technology became our lifeline, we realized how much we missed the full embrace of the human.
The way we live now is an experiment in which we are the human subjects – treated as objects by the technology we have created. Our apps use us as much as we use our apps.