The Internet seems like an infinite source of information and knowledge, yet we often allow it and other digital technology to be infinitely distracting. Cell phones, e-mail, and IM are tried and true digital distractions. Today, that’s advanced to satellite television, social networks, and text messaging. These technologies create a sense of urgency due to their instantaneous or mobile natures. We’ve allowed the dings, buzzes, and chimes to interrupt everything from meals, meetings, and movies. We’ve yielded to urgency or perhaps better put, been fooled into believing that next e-mail, phone call, headline update, or text message is indeed urgent.
In 1967, Charles Hummel wrote an essay about the “tyranny of the urgent,” where his point was not that we have insufficient time to accomplish tasks but rather that we prioritize the urgent over the important:
“We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.”
Since his essay was written in a less digital world, Hummel references the impact of the telephone on the urgent, “A man’s home is no longer his castle; it is no longer a place away from urgent tasks because the telephone breaches the walls with imperious demands.” The latter part of the sentence could now read, “it is no longer a place away from urgent tasks because cable, satellite, Internet, cell phones, etc. breach the walls with imperious demands.”
The urgent is synonymous with the now. It relates to the “What are you doing?” question of Twitter, ostensibly the most egregious of urgency offenders. In the always-on always-connected urgent world, so much time can be spent “keeping up” with new stories, new e-mails, new text messages, and new updates of various types that “keeping up” becomes a task itself. In fact, it teeters on becoming the task of the day; the news of our lives never stops.
But how much is too much?….
First, I agree with the author, every thing in our lives requires a coresponding virtue, or dicipline.
As an old duffer I do find one thing quite intriguing. In his attempting to convince us of the pervasive interuption of our lives that technology creates, he complains of a new interuptive technology interupting an old interuptive technology.
“We’ve allowed the dings, buzzes, and chimes to interrupt everything from meals, meetings, and movies.”
Movies were terribly interuptive to my parents and my church in the 1950s and we were warned to go not at all or only to the very best of movies. Some parents would not allow their children to go to the movies at all. Why did they do so? There were many reasons but for my own parents training of me, one of the reasons was that the movies were a waste of time and money – an interuption of our lives and society that was less than necessary. I find it interesting that I am passing that discretion on to my grandchildren.
Reminds me of the Anglican Communion.
[url=http://www.vulcanhammer.org/anglican/bcp-1928.php]It would be nice if he would give proper attribution to that quotation about things we have left done and undone.[/url]
[blockquote]And there is no health in us.[/blockquote]
This is why I hae developed s deep suspeicion of progress. I don’t mean that better dentistry or medicine is not a real benefit, but that the universal application of the password “progress” is wholly to be distrusted, that somehow bigger is always better, as is faster and,I might add, cheaper. Did I enjoy going to a baseball game in 1950 less than now even though the pitchers were not so fast, the ball not so lively, t he home runns fewer? Not at all, and now, progress has made going to Fenway so expensive I can no longer go.
Is it necessary for the high jumper to clear seven feet for me to watch? Is my life richer, wiser, more satisfying because of television, cell phones, computers? It obviously isn’t, and what is more urgent, more compulsive, than the internet? Suppose my pickup’s maximum speed is 50 instead of 75? And suppose surgery could not implant and tailor the body to some bulging standard? Is Dartmouth, now a big, rich university, with an unappeasable appetite for prestige better than the small, all-male school I went to in 1952? T he notion is as absurd as it is patently false. Am I better off with Wal-Mart ?
This is not mere nostaligia for les neiges d’antan.
Progress, particularly technological progress, has become a form of harassment, a presence like a fly in the ear. And it has left me only one role, the role of the Consumer, which the essayist above did not pay attention to. I was not that, long years ago, and my parents and their parents were not that. My real life has dwindled as my virtual life has expanded, such that, even though I am a farmer, I live more and more though the distant and the secondary at the cost of losing touch with the near and primary. Larry
A corollary is that we expect instant solutions. Although people seem almost genetically impatient, the situation has worsened with technological acceleration. This affects attitudes on things from our church crisis to Iraq.
Larry:
I want to add that which I have heard when I stood at the knee of some old farmer back in the 1950s. What I heard them say, in one form or another, is that technology (cars, tractors, and combines for them) made one lose connection with the soil, plants, and animals. Things went too fast – it takes time to absorb the complexities of the varied plants in a field, the flow of clay, sand, and humus through the fingers. It takes time and patience to hear the birds sing and ascribe meaning to the sound. It takes time to watch a tree leaf unfold and understand the amazing function that they accomplish. That is what I heard and my interpretation of it – a preci’ perhaps.
Do you and they agree?