A month doesn’t pass where you won’t find an article on some website, in some newspaper or magazine, or hear a story on TV about how people are “losing themselves” to some online service, game, technology — you name it. Or the story will go something like this, “Can you believe that when I was talking to my friend the other day at lunch, she whipped out her phone and started texting?!”
There’s this dichotomy or division between how we divide our life with time spent online and time spent interacting with others face-to-face (or in real life — IRL). Or is there?
Nathan Jurgenson, writing over at The New Inquiry suggests that this dichotomy is a false one, and researchers and academics who are hand-wringing about the lack of quality face-time with one another are simply missing the point.
It’s not one or the other, he argues, it’s both because they are both an integral part of our lives now.
How sound is this argument?
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Seen the commercial for the Toyota Venza, how the teenage daughter is saying how “my parents are becoming more antisocial (should be really asocial unless the parents are becoming criminals)” and then mocks how “they only have 21 friends on Facebook”, all the while the parents are using the car to take their bikes to a trail and ride with REAL friends?
Funny, until you think about it more. Kids under 25 really do think life revolves around what they do in front of a screen, and I would LOVE to hear someone comment how they survived without power for the 3-7 days in the Balto-Washington area after the storm from 9 days ago, if they depended on internet services prior.
Life is about moderation. Funny how some who write in this medium do not want to hear this. What are the defenses of addiction? Denial, rationalization, projection, and minimizing?
Hmm, seem to read a lot of this these days.