Are Our Digital Lives Becoming More Important than Our Physical Ones?
I'm supposed to be writing a dissertation, a big one, but find that whenever I find the time to sit down and write the thing something always comes up. I remember back in school when we had homework to do and the lads would ask if I wanted to go and play football after school.
So we used to go to the park, have a kick-about and hand in our homework late or incomplete. Now it seems that rather than pretending to be Ryan Giggs my distractions are are too digital; somebody shares a story with me on Twitter, Facebook pushes notifications to my phone, people message me on Skype, my newsfeed pops up the latest developing headlines. There's always something trying to stop me from working.
That got me to this point, the point where I realize that I've surrounded myself with so much information that it is becoming difficult to see where my physical life stops and my digital life begins. If I want to reference my paper correctly I need to use the online resources, and if I want to get a good grade I need to actually do my research, using online marketing software.
The problem as I see it is that we spend so much time plugged in that we forget how much fun it is to switch off. I tried to cure this problem this afternoon by taking a long walk in the sunshine along the canal next to my house and you know what? It felt great. My phone was left on my desk bleeping away to itself, my watch was discarded into the sofa and my laptop was left alone for so long that I came back to find a screensaver. I didn't even know I had one!
So what do we do from here on out? I know as well as anyone that technology can be an amazing asset, we can share more and talk more and learn all sorts of new and wonderful things that we otherwise would never have had a chance to.
But it does have a cost, and sometimes you just need to take a step back and reclaim some of your own time. Ironically I stumbled across this website this morning, it's called donothingfor2minutes, which does pretty much exactly that. So even if you have to stay down the technological rabbit hole, there is at least one place you can escape to, if only for a brief 120 seconds.
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