I am not an Internet addict by any definition, but I do wonder why I crave something that makes me less happy. After wasting whole afternoons on social media, I have the same guilty mixture of contempt and self-loathing that I get from reading a collection of Christmas letters. The constant self-presentation—a friend starting up a doomed restaurant and using Facebook as a desperate means of attracting customers, a fellow writer broadcasting his position on the bestseller list through Twitter, constant pictures of everybody’s happy families—generates an exhausting sadness born of perpetual status anxiety.
On Friday night, my brain is overwhelmed by the absence of screens. I’m jittery, like my mind is a crumpled piece of paper uncrumpling
The hyper-self-consciousness many of us feel in front of a keyboard is only assuaged by the constant sense that something new and wonderful is about to happen. Yet when you spend a day off Facebook, you miss nothing. Never have I arrived at Saturday night and thought to myself, “I wish I had spent the last 24 hours on Twitter,” even though I love Twitter. The Sabbath makes me realize that my love for Twitter is at least somewhat grotesque, fuelled by social anxieties that ultimately amount to a form of narcissism.
I know I’m not alone. There are others who believe that a once-a-week break from technology has wider social value. The Sabbath Manifesto, a group founded by a bunch of Jewish artists, presents itself in the regalia of political activism—with publicly staged actions (handing out miniature sleeping bags for cellphones) and even an awareness-raising holiday, the National Day of Unplugging. The Sabbath Manifesto group is not composed of Luddites or even nostalgics. The people who hate the Internet also love it, myself certainly included. This combination of love and resistance is new.
Well written piece, and I enjoyed the parallels of avoiding technology and religious practices. Unfortunately the pleasure stopped there, this is one of many stories in what has become a Luddite stream of journalism; praising the simple pleasures of a life without technology without making any material commentary on the value of various mediums of communication and entertainment.
Why do writers feel they must completely abstain from the internet, TV and Blackberry to drive a piece about the ills of modern life? Had the writer considered watching a little less TV, following a little less news on the internet and emailing just that much less, they may have discovered a fine balance.
Going to museums and parading around in nature are portrayed as the inevitable result of abandoning your Blackberry and TV. Why not allow time for both? Watch a nature show on TV instead of a banal sitcom, when you don’t feel like packing the family up to the Science Centre.
This story has been done countless times before, it is practically a genre unto itself, one that does little more than allow digital junkies to feel slightly better about their bravery in the face of an increasingly technological and wired world to which they owe much of their success in the medium as we all read this on the internet…
September 28, 2011 at 10:48 am | by jeff borsatoI use printed maps all the time. I love reading them. So there.
September 28, 2011 at 4:25 pm | by ParkerI was enjoying the article but then I decided to just shut off my MAC and go eat some breakfast.
September 29, 2011 at 8:37 am | by Joe DI loved this article, and felt that it was the right balance of loving our devices but recognizing the need to pull back and focus. Forget the cranks, Stephen; I thought it great.
October 12, 2011 at 10:30 am | by laurieSo what’s Luddite about this perspective? The Luddites destroyed automated machines that threw them out of work; Marche is talking about taking 24 hours off. And he’s not making the kind of case that, say, Sven “Things Were So Much Better When Our Brains Could Still Handle War and Peace” Birkets has made regularly since about 1990: to wit, he’s not arguing that Things Were Better in some hazy past.
It seems me that the argument that going offline from time to time, in a manner that mimics an age-old religious practice, isn’t anti-technology. It’s pro-human.
November 16, 2011 at 7:40 pm | by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang