Prolonged Tech Engagement
The thing about technology is that we all have it, and we have it all the time.
We can look at our phones and computers and tablets and fall into a trance within seconds.
Thumb ups and hearts and comments can lift us up. The lack of them, or the bad ones, can crush us.
Our technology, whether we like it or not, is a surrogate for human interaction, and those likes and hearts give our dopamine receptors a little spark.
Even waking the phone to see if something—anything—has come in, primes our brains for those little feel-good hits we crave.
But it never used to be like this. We once received the dopamine hits from a handshake and a hug, a kiss or a lingering stare.
We now co-regulate with our devices more often than we do with people.
Why?
Because technology is based on an economy of attention, and whomever has your attention for the longest period of time is the winner.
Ever bought something you saw on an Instagram ad? Yeah, you just lost.
Our attention is precious. It’s one of the last human things we have left that’s our own. When we surrender it to the most cleverly curated social media platform or to email or to any other non-human application, we let go of our humanity in the tiniest increments.
Sure, the loss may only be incremental, but the hits add up. The deeper you go, the deeper you go. I see it now in real time with my sons and their iPads and it breaks my hearts that they are in so deep.
We are working on reigning this in, but it’s a real struggle when explaining the risks of prolonged tech engagement to a person whose brain is not fully developed after they have just spent the last hour in a world that is not this one.
Nature and human face-to-face interaction, it seems, can’t compete with the false wonder of what’s on screen.
My wonder now wanders to this main question: how do we reclaim our sense of wonder when we are addicted to our technological appendages? What do realistic boundaries look like between these attention suckers and the human person on the other side?
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Unsplash