I’m coming off a week of self-imposed (modified) computer-rest. For a week, I didn’t blog, read other blogs, comment on other blogs, tweet or even read tweets, only checked Facebook a couple of times, and didn’t obsess over my email.
I engaged in this experiment because of sky-high levels of anxiety. Not that anxiety is a new phenomenon for me, but this particular anxiety seemed to be exacerbated by spending long periods of time online. It’s only gotten worse since I started blogging. When I began, I was naïve enough to think that in order to blog, one simply wrote something and then posted it. And you can, if you want only your close friends and family to read it. If you want to attract a larger audience, you generally need to delve into the world of social networking. At first I thought it was sufficient to link my posts to my Facebook page. But then one day, the lovely Helene re-tweeted one of my posts, and before my astonished eyes, my blog traffic went through the roof.
So I joined Twitter. My relatively quiet computer life took on a hectic quality. No matter what I was doing, there was a low-level cacophony in the background, the constant dull roar of a crowd that compelled me to click between windows like a madwoman to see what I might be missing. And on Twitter, give it just 15 minutes and you’ve missed a LOT.
Then I fell into the web of the blogging community, discovered some truly amazing writers, and found myself spending hours reading and commenting on their fabulous posts.
And like Alice gone down the rabbit hole, it got curiouser and curiouser. I read posts, commented, posted questions and answers to forums, checked Twitter so much that it became an involuntary twitch. My fingers spasmed to the mouse of their own accord to feverishly click between email, blog, draft post, that other blog I was just reading, Twitter, draft post, ohmigosh EMAIL(!), my own blog comments, draft post, Twitter, and Facebook.
I put myself on computer-hiatus because I could feel the inside of my head changing, burning out its transmission in a futile attempt to keep up with the Internet itself. Despite severe insomnia, my brain felt like it had been on a steady diet of Starbucks and Red Bull with some chocolate covered espresso beans on the side. And that is not a fun environment from which to write.
So, hoping to calm myself, into the breach I went. The first 12 hours were rough. I was sweaty and twitchy, and kept gravitating towards my laptop before remembering that it was verboten. Nerves set in. What was I missing? Was I losing followers on my blog? Was there some a controversy I didn’t know about? Did @blogdangerously get thrown in Twitter jail again at this week’s #wineparty, and if so, did she manage another not-so-stealthy jailbreak? Is everybody loving Elizabeth Lyons’ new book as much as I am?
Oddly enough, it turns out I’m not the only person worried about what our multitasking lifestyles are doing to our brains. The New York Times featured an article yesterday about a family struggling with being too plugged in. It reads like the 1980’s public service announcement about drugs, even going so far as to say, “This is your brain on computers.” (Cue visual of frying egg).
The article says that during the workday, people change windows to check email and other programs an average of 37 times per hour. Hubster and I both think that estimate is on the low side. Yet, when you stop to think about it, interrupting your thoughts even 37 times per hour is bound to affect your ability to engage in in-depth reading, reasoning, and writing.
Hubster is an attorney, practicing litigation. He runs two computer monitors continuously throughout the day, and says the two monitors enable him to avoid the constant switching back and forth between windows. By keeping research materials open on one monitor and his working document in the other, he’s able to work more efficiently.
However, most of us don’t have the luxury of two monitors, or Hubster’s near superhuman ability to focus on one project at a time. His must be an unusual brain, because he also has a real knack for picking something up right where he left off. When I switch gears from one thing to another, it takes several minutes to re-acquaint myself, and I lose a good bit of time.
Apparently I’m not alone. NPR ran a segment on multitasking last Friday, featuring a professor of communications at Stanford and an associate professor of neurology, physiology and psychiatry, and director of the neuroscience imaging center at the University of California San Francisco. (Do you think that second guy might multitask?)
The segment begins by referencing that same 1980’s PSA: this is your brain online. (Cue another frying egg).
Both professors agreed that in studies, a negative impact on performance could be observed when subjects were switching rapidly between tasks.
Interestingly enough, the professor of communications also observed that people who multitask the most are actually the least capable of performing the most important elements of multitasking. (Those skills deemed most essential to successful multitasking, in case you were wondering, were ability to filter out irrelevancy, short-term memory, and the actual speed with which one is able to switch from one task to another.)
This lends credence to the theory postulated in an op/ed piece that ran in our local paper earlier this week. It theorized that the way we live in this digital age is actually re-wiring our brains. We’ve gone from being able to focus for great lengths of time on one task to compulsively multitasking, and our brains are changing with our habits. You might say we’re evolving, but evolving in reverse, losing social skills we’ve taken thousands of years as a species to build. This op/ed cited today’s teens’ preference for texting instead of talking—they feel it’s far more efficient. At the risk of sounding like Andy Rooney, does this mean we’re growing a generation of instant-gratification junkies who will not only miss out on the quiet pleasure of hours curled in a chair with a book, but also on discussing that same book at length (in person) at a cocktail party? And if so, how do we help our children to grow up in this world and be a part of it, without becoming Pentium chips?
After this week, I feel calmer. More accurately, it feels as if I’ve reset my brain to analog, and that’s not a bad thing. More and faster aren’t always better. Last night I sat down and immersed myself in a book before bed, instead of using that precious end-of-day time to frantically catch up on self-imposed online “work.”
Don’t get me wrong, I won’t be retiring from social networking or the blog community. But a week’s vacation sure was nice, and since my brain probably has about 1/1000th the processing ability of even a first generation iPhone, I’m going to continue to seek out ways not to treat it like one.
