This is just a “me too”, but it’s a heartfelt one.
Charlie Brooker in Monday’s Guardian: “Every day we humans gleefully churn out yet more books and films and TV shows and videogames and websites and magazine articles and blog posts and emails and text messages, all of it hanging around, competing for attention. Without leaving my seat I can access virtually any piece of music ever recorded, download any film ever made, order any book ever written. And the end result is that I hardly experience any of it.”
Mariella Frostrup in last weekend’s Observer: “I’m the sort of lunatic who considers the phone ringing an invasion of personal privacy, who can’t muster the energy to respond to emails that run at more than a paragraph. At night I lie awake wracked with guilt about unanswered texts and messages but during daylight hours can’t drum up the willpower to clear either my conscience or my in-tray.”
Enough (more than enough) said.
Me three. Especially the Frostrup quote.
“There is need to reflect upon and discuss which social practices and relationships need to be sheltered from the pressure effects of global, commercial networking. ….. we would do well to ask: when and where does it make sense to remain unconnected? ….. we have become perilously close to achieving complete slavery to email, digital work, and the wired and wireless apparatus that surrounds us.”
Langdon Winner, “Whatever Happened to the Electronic Cottage”
I recommend Horace.
Having read the rest of the Frostrup article, I agree wholeheartedly! ‘Communication paralysis’ is definitely something I suffer from, although ironically Facebook seems to help with this – presumably because of the enforced brevity and ability to reach several people at once. I thought I’d hate the latter aspect, as like many of us I communicate differently with different people, but keeping my ‘friends’ list small and being selective about what I comment on seems to work ok.