Relationships in the Digital Aether

I've lost count of how many times I've had this type of conversation over the internet or on Facebook:

Distant friend: *comments on my photo* 

Me: "That's so true! Also by the way, I miss you :)"

Distant friend: "Me too! We HAVE to hang out sometime!" 

Plans for definite future socialization are confirmed, usually all in the span of five minutes, never to be followed up on again. 

Let me clarify. Usually if it's a close friend, we find some way to make plans. However, it's those friends from summer programs, those digital acquaintances with which hollow promises are made in the facade of a close friendship. 

This has been an ongoing trend that I've noticed. Based on my totally-not-statistical observations, many people I know (including myself, sometimes) tend to act more outgoing, more effervescent over the internet than we are in real life.  We are quicker to compliment. We are quicker to send out hearts emojis than give hugs in real life (except me--I'm probably one of the most open huggers you'll find). We are bolder, more daring, quicker to reach out and show affection and feign a closeness that would take maybe days or weeks to manifest in real life. I've met many friends that seemed confident over the internet, only to be more withdrawn and less open in real life. 

This doesn't just affect friendships as well--this affects relationships, too. A New York Times Modern Love essay a couple of years back touched on this subject, when a girl who fell in love with a guy she'd met at a digital internet conference developed an incredible relationship with him over Skype worked to meet up with him in real life, only to discover that he was closed off, hesitant, and ignorant of her. In real life, it turned out that he valued his digital presence and his image rather than the actual relationships he had with people around him. 

I wonder what boldness and intrepidness takes place over the ambiguous digital interwebs that can't translate to real life. Is it that the stakes are higher in real life--that spending time in each others' physical presence forces a commitment that doesn't have to be held over the internet? (In the internet, all it takes is to ex out of a chat box or not respond to a message--in real life, we can't just leave) Is it that we have a longer time to polish what we have to say over the internet? Or does what we have to say over the internet hold less weight, and therefore we can exaggerate emotions, connections, and friendships? 

One thing is for sure--the internet makes it easier for us to say things. But does that make us more truthful about our feelings, or does it give us more space to lie? 

Nature and Technology

When I was five years old, my dad, fearing I would get lost in the golf course and nature preserves that made up my backyard, pressed a compass and an area map to my hand and told me to familiarize myself with my surroundings. With nothing better to do (and dreading the alternative of being locked in my house all day with nothing but mindless cartoons), I set off through those paths and thickets, finding my way around the trees and shrubs, differentiating my landmarks by the type of trees in that area or by the unique assortment of pockmarked rocks.

It was nothing impressive, being the queen of my little vacant golf course-and-forest domain, but it was something. With that knowledge, I began to find my way around my neighborhood subdivision, swapping rocks and trees for neat, wide, concrete sidewalks and steeped-roofed houses.

Knowledge of nature was something innate, something that could only be truly learned through firsthand, visceral experience. And yet, sometime between then and now, I had lost it.

When I was about to back out of the garage the other day and reached out to turn on my GPS, I paused for a moment. Looking down my driveway, I realized that I had used my phone’s GPS every single day in the past four days—and that without it, I would be utterly lost. Hit with a sense of nostalgia and wanting to be able to navigate my way to Skokie as easily as I had navigated my neighborhood growing up, I began to realize that in that the ability to navigate myself around nature, once a predominant part of my childhood, was now one step removed from my life—and that technology had somehow filled that gap.

Does technology remove us from nature? I’m not sure. On one hand, technology helps us map places, categorize wildlife, and see gorgeous natural settings that would have been nearly impossible to see without the help of a camera and the internet. But on the other hand, I realize that in our quest to use technology to figure out nature, we’ve removed ourselves from it. This TIME article emphasizes naturalists’ fears that the middle-aged ecologists—the ones trained before the advent of technology—were perhaps the last generation to fully and truly experience themselves in wildlife—and not just in the technological knowledge of it. As wildlifers spend more time analyzing nature in front of a computer and less time actually in nature, it might diminish their true familiarity with their field.

Technology helps us know nature and our surroundings. But I fear that in our quest to know and not to experience, we are taking nature away from ourselves.  

Post-Truth

Every year, the Oxford dictionary picks a “word of the year” that they believe should be recognized. This year, it was the term “post-truth”.

It’s official definition? It’s an adjective, “Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”
Given what has happened in the past year, it’s no surprise that this word was chosen, given the rise in politics that have adapted more to the soundbite tactics of Twitter than to factual news articles, and given the eminence of “fake news” during this election cycle. It’s also no surprise that the rise in “post-truth”-ism is directly facilitated by the rise in social media and digital technology—like I had mentioned in an earlier blog post, social media fragments the distribution of information, meaning that anyone could report their own news and not necessarily have it edited and fact-checked by a news corporation. Some bits of information may “seem” as if they’re news—mostly because they have a thousand Facebook shares, or because they bear a legitimate-sounding headline.

According to an article on BBC, AC Grayling, a renowned philosopher, acknowledged the vast changes in the dissemination of news, saying that “’All you need now is an iPhone. Everyone can publish their opinion - and if you disagree with me, it's an attack on me and not my ideas.” An Al-Jazeera article also pointed out that there was little flexibility or true communication in social media, saying that “It deprives people of human contact and the accompanying intimacy and exchange of opinions, which could lead to changing a wrong impression or correcting an inaccurate belief.”
“Post-truth” politics and journalism is a phenomenon that doesn’t affect just journalists—it touches all of us, and that same BBC article has accused the “post-truth” state of news as causing damage to “the whole fabric of democracy”.

What’s curious to me is that politics—or American politics, at least, has always been shaped around the tenet of “truth” and honesty. We have “Honest Abe” as a winning campaign slogan; we pass down the story of how George Washington admitted to chopping down his father’s favorite cherry tree. What do we do now, now that “post-truth” is becoming the hallmark of American politics?

For me, “post-truth” has an ominous tone. Throughout my life, I’ve always heard a certain few “post“ words over and over again. Post-9/11. Post-WWII. Postmodern. Each time I’ve heard those words, it’s always also brought on a ponderous sense of finality, as if it was impossible to return to that “pre” world, as if was an event that had unraveled beyond the capability to return to its original state. I wonder if “post-truth” will have the same effect. Can we ever return or revert back to an honest world, and correct the inflammatory mistakes we’ve made? Or have we completely and irrevocably moved past the truth, and into the digital world of deceptive madness?

How important is truth to you, and do you believe that everyday media affects that?

4 Tools to Minimize Online Distractions: My Experience

A while back I listed the New Year’s resolution of trying to focus and single-task more, instead of striving for the elusive (and frankly, for me, rather unattainable) art of trying to multi-task and juggle multiple subjects at once with success. I took this pursuit to my internet use, and tried out a variety of apps, websites, and software that would help me buckle down and get my work done faster. I ended up trying out four main applications/websites—each of which had a different approach to try to get me to focus—and figured out which ones I personally worked best with.

1. TomatoTimer: based on the Pomodoro technique of working (a simple time-blocking concept in which one works for 25-minute bursts, followed by 5-minute breaks), TomatoTimer was a no-frills website that simply worked as a timer. While I liked the idea of working in 25-minute periods of time, initially, I discovered that I preferred much longer working periods and breaks—I usually don’t get very productive with something until I’m around 20 or so minutes in. In this case, I loved the idea of the Pomodoro technique, but I felt like it didn’t quite click with my working style.  
   
2. Stayfocused: This is a Chrome extension that you can build into your browser, and you can set a certain amount of time to spend on time/attention-wasting sites (such as Facebook, Youtube, etc.). After your time’s up, you are blocked from those sites. That extension worked wonderfully for me at the beginning, as it allowed me to choose which sites to block, but still, I felt like I could always “cheat” and increase the “allowed time” when the timer was going.  
3. ColdTurkey: This is sort of the reverse of Stayfocused. Instead of allowing you a set time on time-wasting sites, this Windows software locks you out of certain websites for a set amount of time. This worked better for me than Stayfocused in terms of getting on track, and when I tried it out I ended up getting a ton of work done. It was definitely super-compatible with my learning and working style, and allowed the flexibility of being able to access the internet after a period of worktime. 
4. Freedom: the strictest of distraction-free tools, Freedom basically shuts the internet down for a predetermined period during the day (the irony in the name is, of course, appreciated). Though I was able to get a *ton* of work done when I used this, I can definitely see where it gets to be too restrictive—after all, what if I’m working on a blog and need to do research? What if I’m working on a weekly brief and can’t access Google Drive? If you want absolute, internet-free focus, this is the software for you, and in my past uses of it (before this year) it’s gotten me through its fair share of research papers and college essays. Just be forewarned—once you set the time, you can’t access the internet – unless you completely restart your computer.

Though all apps helped me to a varying degree, Cold Turkey worked the best for me, as it allowed me strict restrictions but also gave me the flexibility to choose which websites to block. Not all productivity tools are for everyone—it was surprising how the Pomodoro technique, so widely lauded by online productivity gurus, didn’t quite work for me. However, throughout this process, I was able to get my work done faster so I could sleep better, and spend more time interacting with friends, so I’m definitely not opposed to trying out more distraction-free apps in the future—and keeping the ones I liked this time around.

Do you guys believe in these productivity tools? If so, which ones do you like?

Technology and the Work/Life Balance

Recently, TIME published an article on how five countries around the world are trying to improve the work/life balance of their employees by introducing certain strict regulations. One of the countries was France, whose workers and businessmen just gained the right to disconnect and refuse to answer their emails out of office hours. Those regulations closely mirror those of German companies, who starting as early as 2014 created a cultural norm of not answering emails when one is away on vacation.

I, for one, think this is a great idea. In this age of technology and 24/7 connectedness, there can at times be this underlying expectation to always be "on call". Somehow, being able to get an incoming message at any hour of the day translates to bosses expecting quicker response times and action out of workers, even if it means responding to emails at midnight and making sales deals while away on vacation. For me, I'd always loved the idea of being able to be connected, professionally, at any time and at any place, but this appreciation of connection has also come with an underlying fear that productivity and response times will only become a race to the bottom, with work taking over our lives and without an iota of quiet, unfettered free time to ourselves. I mean, we're already seeing hints of that happening, from Amazon workers who are expected to reply to emails in the middle of the night to Silicon valley employees whose livelihoods are embroiled in the hubs of ever-connected tech companies and startups. If we can't step away from our work, then will we achieve a well-balanced life? Is balance even possible to begin with?

There is definitely a greater potential for self-improvement and quicker response with the advent of technology. Look, there is a merit to working hard and being willing to stay connected to "get ahead". But--and I say this as a self-professed rabid semi-perfectionist who has worked at all hours of the night--I think that in workers in this time period should definitely not have to be swept up in dizzying, high-speed expectations of constantly being connected to company obligations and work responsibilities via email and smartphones. To me, being expected to be connected at all times and *constantly* answer company e-mails outside of work equates to an insidious type of overtime--something that is productive when done intermittently, but definitely not healthy as a lifestyle.

I admire the steps that Germany and France have taken to acknowledge the effect of technology on company expectations and curb those expectations by introducing regulations, and I hope that our country also takes those matters into consideration as well.

January Resolutions: Finding Time to Unplug

I, for one, love the idea of making New Year’s resolutions. I love creating elaborate, sprawling lists on New Year’s day, where I make several vows to be a better, more productive version of myself. It’s always the shiny promise of a new year that invigorates me and inspires me to start over and do better.

This year, one of my resolutions is twofold; unplugging and single-tasking.

For a while, I always thought that multitasking was better. I marveled at the ability to juggle multiple tasks at once, to chat on the phone and simultaneously do homework while filling out a form that was needed for school.

But over the years, my attempts at multitasking have cost me both my efficiency and organization. Trying to juggle multiple things at once often leads to a scattered focus, and I ultimately fail to do any of the tasks to the best of my abilities. I’ve often found myself draining my attention on what’s in front of me by doing two things at once without even knowing it. During class, I’d continuously peek at my email inbox. While doing math homework, I’d often be distracted by funny videos or texts my friends sent me. While talking to parents, I’ve found myself glancing down at my phone, 

compromising my attention. This brain slowdown doesn’t just affect me -- research from the American Psychological Association shows that there is delay in the brain every time someone needs to switch between tasks or divide their attention between two tasks.  

This year, I want to cut back on technology and media in order to be more efficient and better at accomplishing what I want to do. I’ll take notes on paper on class, my computer firmly shut and put away. I’ll converse with people without longing for the comfort of a cell phone. I’ll start doing things one at a time. I might be slow at first, but at least I’ll get things done right that way.

What’s your relationship with multitasking? Do you think it’s a necessary skill or a means of distraction? 

READY PLAYER ONE and our Virtual Selves

Over Thanksgiving break, I read this book Ready Player One on a whim. It was a young adult futuristic novel that takes place in the year 2044. In a world driven by natural disasters, resource shortages, and overpopulation, there is a vast online virtual reality universe called OASIS that people—especially the main character Wade—spend all their time on in order to escape their bleak reality. The world is filled with everything from virtual reality videogames to virtual classrooms. However, people who engage in the virtual reality world are all obsessed with one common mission—the quest of finding the virtual “keys” in that world somewhere that would eventually lead to the late OASIS founder’s fortune, a fortune that he left behind for the first person that would solve his riddles and find all three of his “keys”, in order to claim both his fortune and control of OASIS. The game pits unlikely hero Wade against corporations battling to find the keys and take control of OASIS with entry fees and limited access.

Though I mostly considered Ready Player One to be a fast-paced, thrilling adventure book, I also found it to contain revelations about our current and future society. We’ve become increasingly virtual since personal computers and cell phones were made. As time progresses and technology gets even more elaborate, would we choose to abandon reality in favor of virtual worlds? In the novel, the main character Wade has lost his parents from an early age, and lives with extended family that he hates, so it makes sense that he would spend all his time involved in his online quest. But what about other people who live in close-knit families and communities? Would they choose to separate themselves from the “real” people around them to pursue the experiences and people that the encounter online?

Another topic that is addressed in this novel is regarding the differences in the ways we present ourselves online versus the ways we present ourselves in real life. In the reality world, Wade augments his features, making his avatar slightly slimmer and less acne-prone. One of his best friends on OASIS is this avatar named Aech. Aech is a white male, and yet Wade finds out later in the book that the person behind Aech is actually a black female who made her avatar white and male because she thought being a white guy would make her more successful and give her more opportunities. It’s no secret that when we can create virtual versions of ourselves even in today’s society—in games, social forums, etc.—we often augment the “good” parts of ourselves, like Wade, or change our appearance entirely, like Aech, in order to communicate across to others a better version of ourselves. Though we might be able to project our “ideal” selves, it does potentially hurt the genuineness of our communication—we might become entirely different people on the Internet, and people would make friends with not our true selves but the selves we project.