Balancing our lives with technology.

I was walking to the college campus where my husband is a professor, and noticed something for the first time- maybe I just hadn't been paying attention before. Nobody was talking. Well, let me rephrase that; nobody was talking to a physical person in close proximity to them. Every person walking on that campus was either talking on a cell phone, listening to an ipod, or texting.

The trajectory of our world has changed. We have become obsessed with too many distractions that do not lead to accomplishment, mastery, or useful skills, outside of the screen. Studies have shown that children now spend up to 6 hours a day in front of a screen of some sort. That means 42 hours a week, and 168 per month.

My question is what is 168 hours per month taking the place of? Our children are sitting down and playing games, watching tv, texting or looking up irrelevant, entertaining things on the internet. So do we even know what we've lost? I think this shift in how we live has come so insidiously , and has been so pervasive, that we have not recognized the full extent of what we are doing to ourselves, our children and our society. I'm afraid that our attachment to all things electronic has come with a price. I think it has cost us in ways we won't even be aware of until later- until another generation has grown up "hooked up' and we begin to see more of the collateral damage.

I am not an alarmist, or a pessimist, but I'm worried about what we have given up as human beings to make room for the non-human. Probably the most crucial loss has been social interaction. Like the students I saw walking on campus, connecting to wires ends up disconnecting us from other people, one way or another. Driving down the road, you see moms with a phone to their ear while their child sits in the seat next to them. A few moments, we might say, insignificant time. But what do all of those insignificant moments add up to over the 18 years or so that mom has with the kids? Do you see how deceitful it is? We are robbing ourselves of what is right in front of us, of what is real. Real face to face conversations, real skills, real exercise, real letter writing, real books, and on and on. We trade real life for the convenient, the entertaining, the immediate gratification that we feed ourselves 24/7. it is said that to truly master anything, you must spend 10,000 hours in practice. Piano, throwing a ball, drawing, public speaking, magic tricks, camping, cooking, storytelling, training the dog to fetch.... There is a whole world out there independent of technology. Waiting to be explored, waiting to bring a sense of accomplishment and connection. But we are spending our 10,000 hours in front of screens, updates, photographing ourselves, sending happy faces, and lol- laughing online.

I am worried that we are becoming desensitized as a nation. That we see people as less than human as we wade ever deeper into this human-less world of technology. As we are bombarded with news on every screen we own and continuously fed horrible information about happenings we have absolutely no control over, we tend to go to the safest place we know. Home. Away from the crowds. Into our own little safe world, where we have everything we need at our fingertips. Unfortunately, it's untrue. We need human contact and socialization now more than ever. But do people talk to each other like they did 10 years ago? Do people think about talking to strangers they meet in the store, smiling, or helping each other as much as they used to? Do neighbors know each other, do people on the street say hi? Even if we weren't less in tune with each other, the sheer volume of time spent on cell phones, ipods, computers, etc., creates the impossibility of us being able to communicate in a natural, normal way.

We seem to be cultivating the very things that we hate about our society. Desensitization to violence, instant access to any and all things , whether they are good for us or not, isolation and loneliness, loss of community, loss of skills, learning and accomplishment as we trade true practice, true connection, and true discipline in for an adulterous substitute.

I may be more radical than most in my approach to technology, and obviously, I'm using it. But I put extreme limits on computer and tv time for my kids. I'm just not sure that it does them more good than harm. And I think childhood, especially, should be spent "playing",in the truest sense of the word. Out in nature, running and playing, reading books, playing board games, planting seeds and petting a kitten. For a long time.

Let's teach kids how to use their imaginations and diminish the constant stream of images and noises fed into their minds. Cultivate their talents. My hope is that we teach our children the difference between real life and real play and the technological world that has encroached so quickly upon us. I hope we know the difference..

I challenge you to have a true interaction with someone today. Whether it's telling a child a story, making conversation with a neighbor, helping a stranger, or giving a genuine complement to someone. - making a true connection with someone has the potential of making a much bigger impact than we know. And if we all tune in a little more to the life surrounding us, our world just might become a better place to live.