Placestory

Here’s your brain on media. Check out this clever video about media consumption, especially for girls. I am always trying to measure how being on the Internet makes me feel bad. Bad= tired eyes, logy, irritable and disconnected (despite the connection). It doesn’t take a Mensa to come to some conclusions.

As I told a friend recently, I’d rather hold hands with a real human than type a tome to human. It just gets soul-sucking after a while, as I discovered while trying to plan a month-long trip and spending a week solid surfing the internet guidebooks. And I’m barely on it, compared to many whose complete livelihood (or pleasure) exists on the 13×13 inch aluminum plastic clamshell. My husband and I don’t have phones with email, and even so, we feel attacked by email. How do you maintain sanity with iPhones?

Media is in our lives whether we like it or not. I appreciate facebook for the articles people post; I’m less interested in the type of cupcake someone ate at 2.35 yesterday afternoon. One friend who refuses to be on it said that “it breed pathology.” I don’t think she’s wrong. It also wastes time. We become animals busy with minutiae (photos of our long lost highschool friend on vacation in Berlin, a stupid article on 33 funny dog faces) that don’t matter.

We just have to choose what media and how much media. But no one is calling each other out, in part because we’ve acclimatized. Is it okay that I’m on my computer right now, and it’s almost 10pm? I’d be healthier if I was asleep. When I go to bed right after computer time, I wake up feeling hung over.

So, I’m setting my own parameters, creating some structure to the geography of my day.

1) Absolutely no computer at any surface where food is eaten or prepared.

2) Absolutely no computer in bed.

3) Eat breakfast and go outside before checking email.

4) After dinner, don’t be on the computer. (This is hard for me because I often write at night, so I’m going to say no Internet, but Microsoft Word okay).

5) No computer or cell phone in the room that I sleep in. This one is big.

My husband recently said, “I just want to get a big dinosaur desktop that sits in one place.” Maybe we’ll all revert to that, once we realize that having devices attached to our body feels like hell. But first that would require paying attention to what we are actually feeling.