What is the cost of constantly checking your phone?

On Thursday, we opened up a discussion about whether smart phones (and our addictions to them) are chipping away at the fabric of society.  And then on Friday, we continued along this theme by taking on Facebook doubles, those highly-polished online versions of your more-flawed human selves.

Today we continue along these lines.

—-

Let’s first acknowledge that probably for most of us, at our best, technology is supplemental–it’s supportive to our lives. It extends and reinforces our values and allows us to share life, or some semblance of it, with more people…people who we may still care about, but who we don’t necessarily share a dorm room or place on the varsity basketball team with anymore.

How nurturing technology can be, even at its healthiest, is certainly up for debate. Perhaps, some say, it just gives us the “illusion” that we are connected. We sink hours “investing” in these online friendships that probably won’t offer even a fraction of the benefits we would have received if we had put the same time and energy into offline relationships. We become the quintessential person who is swimming in a sea of thousands but still feels lonely. That guy with 10,000 online friends but no one to take him to the garage to pick up his car after it gets repaired.

Some might say that illusion is more dangerous than you think. Purely because it’s a time suck.

Take what my friend Lindsey, who I mentioned in post 2, says about that in her piece called I’ve Forgotten Why.

I think I loved how it allowed me to savor experiences. But lately it seems like in sharing them I have to put a big ‘ol pause on the savoring. Taking a minute to craft the perfect tweet, instagram, and Facebook post, forces me step out of the conversation and pick up my phone {and let’s be honest once the phone is picked up, I’m 75% working and 25% savoring}.

Or consider how when talking about technology, New York Times writer Frank Bruni poins out the sad reality that some of us are traveling (vacationing etc.) without seeing the scenery because we’re so stuck to our gadgets. He laments our “unprecedented ability to tote around and dwell in a snugly tailored reality of our own creation, a monochromatic gallery of our own curation.”

So let’s extend the percentages Lindsey introduced one step farther:

What is the cost? If we invest 75% of our attention in our face to face interactions and 25% into crafting or maintaining an projecting an alternative online reality?

What is the cost to us? How does it shift our perceptions of reality and perhaps, in extreme cases, even prompt us to live inside a well-crafted lie? What is the consequence of that?

And what is the cost to other people? Either people who look on and feel depressed because they think everyone else is somehow more A-list than they are (when really they might just not be as good at constructing a false reality).

Or to people who need us to be 100% there in any given moment?

What do you think? Does the cost of technology trouble you or does your online activity fit naturally into your life rhythms?

Photo Source | Photo Policy