The RIP tide of Technology :: Part One

And before you know it, you are swept further and further away and daily life becomes smaller and smaller, until you are pulled under in what looked like calm on the surface.

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I am late to the party, but there's not much to celebrate. Actually, I am years late in reading the book 

The Shallows : What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. 

I wish I hadn't missed that one, but timing is everything and maybe the timing with this one has been perfect.

Two months ago, I found a lady I had followed during the early days of blogging and then for a time on Instagram. She had long since deleted her Facebook and Instagram accounts and newer posts on her blog were pretty sparse. Looking back through the archives from a few years ago, I found a post that caught my eye, so much so that I printed out all 12 pages. 

As someone who has had an ongoing love/hate relationship herself with time spent online, it intrigued me. Her words drew me like a moth to a flickering candle and I wanted to read, re-read and read again this path she took in leaving social media. I thought why did she do that and what was her motivation. It was within those 12 pages that she mentioned the book, The Shallows. 

I quickly took off to the library to get a copy and spent several weeks pouring over the chapters. I poured, but it went slow as I had to follow and digest a subject I knew nothing about. It took reading half of the book until I could begin putting any pieces together of what has turned out to be a very big puzzle. 

The book stretched me in so many ways, and as I went along it became pretty mind blowing. It's content made me angry and sad, with tears shed at times. I know...shedding tears over a book about the internet, but I was born on the tail end of the Baby Boomer generation. I have had all of my sweet girlhood and early adulthood knowing nothing of big TECH. I actually thank God for that fact quite often.

I read how there is now a "Generation Net". These are the kids who have grown up using the web and know nothing about life without it. How they "don't necessarily read a page from left to right and from top to bottom". "How the "calm, undistracted linear mind is being pushed aside by a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole out information in short, disjointed, often over-lapping bursts the faster the better". 

Our attention and focus are being seized and scattered to the wind. I started thinking to myself, why didn't we see this before now, why didn't I see this before now. But, we know how deception works and who the author of deception is, sorta like hiding in plain sight.

I shuddered reading over the last chapters where the author added, "It's an ancient idea, one that was given perhaps it's most eloquent and ominous expression by the Old Testament psalmist:

 

'Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men's hands. 

They have mouths, but cannot speak, eyes, but cannot see. 

They have ears, but cannot hear, nor is there breath in their mouths. 

Those who make them will be like them, and so will all who trust in them.'

Psalm 135:15-18 (NIV)

The second name she dropped in her post was Jaron Lanier, a "virtual reality pioneer" and author of the book

Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier. 

I ordered this one and it helped me put more pieces of the puzzle together. I was now beginning to dig into some ugly truth. Jaron writes, "For years I had to endure quite painful criticism because I was perceived as a traitor for criticizing what we were doing.."

During my reading of this book, a half page article showed up in my local newspaper, "Tabaco-like warning label for social media sought by US Congress to act." Let's face it, just like big Tabaco, big Tech isn't going anywhere. 

Then, a few days later in the same paper, "Apple enters AI race hoping to overtake early leaders." 

I slowed things down a bit by reading 

Katie Westenberg's book "But Then She Remembered : How to give God your full attention in a distracted world". 

This book takes us to the heart of distraction by asking the questions, "What if the physical effects of distraction are only symptomatic of a more important issue in the life of the believer? What if eyes prone to wonder become correlative to a heart that is much the same? What if a mind fueled by pinball patterns of thinking, emaciated from the kind of focus that could provide any real sustenance, becomes a mind that struggles to linger with the Lord, to remember His ways, who He is, and how He loves?" 

She made the excellent point that we seem to be able to put our full focus on many, many unimportant things, things that we really want to pay attention to. Hmmm

In the midst of what now was a full on assault of my time and energy, my desk was covered with books, newspapers, research articles and most importantly my Bible. I kept wading through more books like this one

Ana A'vila, "Make The Most of your Productivity : A Guide To Honoring God with your Time". 

This book went along well with Katie Westenberg's book since Ana also focused on a similar line of thinking, such as, "impulses that demand our attention at every moment, causing our minds to lose the ability to focus on deep things." "It's like when a child spends hours in front of the television : he loses the ability to find fun in the world around him and finally just wants to be entertained. 

Avoid becoming a brain that only wants to feed on the sugar of the superficial."

As I finished reading the last of the four books that I have listed above, it became obvious that I needed to share my thoughts here on the blog. 

However, I need to make it clear this post is just that...my thoughts...to be continued

Part Two is found HERE

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Below you will find more headlines that came at me during the months of putting this post together and they are bright and hot red lights for anyone who has commonsense. The last two simply took my breath away!!