Blog Draft

Beyond Good and Bad

• How are social networking sites redefining your life?
• Are you always using the internet to improve your life, make you happier or more knowledgable / understanding?
• What healthy habits will allow us to make the most of these digital resources?

A few years ago the gossip columns went wild over the story:

Twitter Implicated in Break Up Between Aniston and Mayer

As the story goes, John Mayer told Jennifer Aniston that he didn't have enough time while on tour to keep in touch with her very often.  Then she found out he wasn't keeping in touch with her because he was too busy spending hours scrolling through tweets.

We don’t need a scientific study to see that everyone around us is addicted to the internet and social network sites, laptops and smartphones.  When a moment of boredom overcomes us, it's hard to resist opening a new tab to scroll through Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Blogger, Flickr, and the list goes on.  If life is considered the sum of our personal choices, then our decision to use social networks is redefining the human experience.

When's the last time you went an hour without checking your phone or laptop for notifications? How about two hours? A day? A week?

Internet use is becoming so engrained into our lives that we are forgetting to remain aware of the ways digital technology mediates reality.  Communication through technology both constrains and enhances our interactions with others.  On one hand we can't share the nonverbal and paralinguistic cues of face to face conversations, but on the other hand we can share gifs, links and other digital media that express our feelings in other ways.  My concern is that when we become accustomed to substituting existing digital media for unconscious cues, we are homogenizing and standardizing individual identity and communication.  

In other words, you are sharing a part of your identity when you share an article or emoji that's interesting to you, but this identity is formed using someone else's expression.  You didn't design the emoji or write the article, and a lot of other people are expressing themselves in the exact same way. This isn't true when we interact IRL (in real life).  In offline communication, no one smiles exactly the way you smile or laughs the way you laugh.  Interacting offline allows for more unique expressions of identity, and this is something I consider integral to a happy life.

As the psychologist Abraham Maslow says:
Human life will never be understood unless its highest aspirations are taken into account. Growth, self-actualization, the striving toward health, the quest for identity and autonomy, the yearning for excellence (and other ways of phrasing the striving “upward”) must by now be accepted beyond question as a widespread and perhaps universal human tendency

NOMOPHOBIA

Maybe it scares you a little to think about going a week without your phone.  About a year ago I believed in refreshing once a week by spending a day completely unplugged.  Something happened between then and now, and it's been months since I went a day without checking my phone.  Some research says up to two-thirds of the American population might suffer from nomophobia (no mobile phone phobia).

This fear is due to the amount of communication we accomplish through our phones. Technology offers us a channel into another dimension of the world, cyberspace, where we can explore and define aspects of our self identity through interactions with other people online. This process occurs largely through social network sites.

Basic Resource

Like eating and sleeping, internet use has become a necessary part of life today, especially for those in academics. The internet is a database of human knowledge, and we access this knowledge in different ways through different websites.  Social networking sites allow us to access knowledge about other people and overcome location differences to interact with anyone online in real time. 

We're Addicted, Now What?

http://www.mindful.org/mindful-social-networking/

Bibliography

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563215001806

http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/04/01/chapter-one-a-portrait-of-smartphone-ownership/

http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheets/mobile-technology-fact-sheet/

http://www.census.gov/history/pdf/2013computeruse.pdf

http://nms.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/04/09/1461444814531364

http://www.pbs.org/thisemotionallife/topic/connecting/connection-happiness

Works Cited

http://mashable.com/2009/03/23/twitter-mayer-aniston/#QnFT4S8wVgqB
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brain-wise/201209/why-were-all-addicted-texts-twitter-and-google

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/18/nomophobia-smartphone-sep_n_7266468.html
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/405686-life-is-a-sum-of-all-your-choices-so-what

http://go.galegroup.com.ezp.lib.rochester.edu/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=nysl_ro_rochstru&id=GALE|A311183864&v=2.1&it=r&sid=summon&userGroup=nysl_ro_rochstru

http://doi.org.ezp.lib.rochester.edu/10.2147/PRBM.S41386

http://go.galegroup.com.ezp.lib.rochester.edu/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA338522439&v=2.1&u=nysl_ro_rochstru&it=r&p=ITOF&sw=w&asid=4e8a3cde27de2016c4a36dca6f4832b2
http://infinitelimitations.us/messe-motion/messe-motion.html
http://infinitelimitations.us/e-motion/e-motion.html

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167923611002417