Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Cyber Crack-heads

Arnold Ahlert

By the time you read this, Thanksgiving will have passed. But I wanted to get this down while the feelings were fresh. Like most Americans, I attended a get together with more than a few kids. Unlike most Americans, at least I’m betting it’s most Americans, I was pretty dismayed by the behavior of those kids — and more than a few adults as well. 

I’m going to tell you something most of you already know, but either can’t or won’t admit: people, especially children, are addicted to technology. Not fond of — addicted.
I know I’m probably speaking for what is now a minority of Americans, but when I see kids spend an entire day with their heads glued to a computer screen, totally oblivious to everything around them, it gets me angry. For one thing, it’s flat out rude. For another it borders on dysfunctional — or at least it did before the adults started behaving just as bad or worse.
Since when did it become perfectly acceptable to check one’s I-Phone every three or four minutes? When did it become OK to “multi-task,” as in carry on a conversation with one person while texting someone else? When did it become OK to carry on a phone conversation in front of everyone else without making the slightest attempt to keep it private? When did it become OK to be subjected to the ongoing beeps, burps and belches of incoming message alerts from people’s phones?
More importantly, when did all of this crap become acceptable in the middle of dinner on Thanksgiving day?
As for the addiction part, don’t take my word for it. Hey parents, assuming you can tear your own self away, try taking away your kid’s computer and cell phone for one day. If you really want to be edgy, try including no TV in the mix. Then sit back and watch what happens — if you have the guts to do anything so “radical” in the first place.
I’m betting most of you won’t for a couple of reasons. First, you don’t want to hear the inevitable whine that will arise from those same kids who I’d bet dollars to doughnuts are rapidly getting to the point — if they’re not there already — where the real world represents little more than an annoying break from their cyberspace existence. Which gives me a nice segue into reason number two: nobody wants to see their own child go through the same kind of withdrawal symptoms that any junkie who can’t get another fix goes through.
Think I’m kidding? Researchers at the University of Maryland got 125 students at 12 colleges to agree not to use any technological devices, including television and radios, for 24 hours. The results? The therapeutic community has already come up with a name for the symptoms these students exhibited: Information Deprivation Disorder which the volunteers themselves described as “physiological and physical symptoms comparable to addicts trying to quit smoking or drugs.”
And that’s college kids. What do you think is happening to five-year-olds who’ve never known a world where people weren’t relentlessly bombarded by technology?
I’ll tell what’s happening. Unprecedented levels of social dysfunction that’s become as acceptable as it is pervasive. A voluntary abandonment of manners, social interaction, and privacy as a “reasonable” tradeoff for being able to check one’s messages, the ability to text and tweet whatever inanity comes into one’s head, and the posting of info on websites in cyberspace that are nothing more than the glitzier equivalent of posting the same info on the wall of the Port Authority Bus Terminal on 42nd Street.
How stupid is that? I met a kid who just got a job working for a finance company. When he went for his final interview, they handed him a 78-page stack of everything he’d ever posted at Facebook — including the stuff he had deleted. They told him the couldn’t use it against him legally, but they wanted him to know they had it.
Feeling a little naked yet, cyber-heads? More to the point, do you even care how exposed you are?
And spare me all the b.s. about needing this or that for an emergency. The world functioned for centuries before everyone hooked themselves up to the grid 24/7/365. Furthermore, one can turn a phone on for emergencies. Leaving it on is a whole other story.
It’s story that won’t end well. Whether people realize it or not, everyone needs a little down time. It used to be called taking time to “stop and smell the flowers,” and trust me a picture of flowers on your cell phone is a lousy substitute. So is playing video games instead of running around outside, which might explain why childhood obesity rates have more than tripled in the past 30 years.
I know I’m shoveling sand against the cyber-tide and most people will dismiss what I’m saying, assuming they can tear themselves away from the grid long enough to get the message. But when this phenomenon gets even more out of hand than it is now — and it most assuredly will — don’t say you weren’t warned.
And one more thing. If you come to dinner at my house and pull this crap, rest assured that a door is gonna hit ya where the good lord split ya on your way back to real world outside. I’m one of those freaks who still enjoys face-to-face interaction. Go figure.

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