Making changes

John Myhill asks: what will you change in yourself in 2018?

Can we, at a personal level, make real changes to our lives in 2018? I find giving things up to be very beneficial: not driving a car, not eating meat and other animal products, and not working for money have each been leaps forward in my life. So, on my seventieth birthday next September, I plan to give up the internet. To give something up seems to require three elements.

First, it needs to be something that is ‘normal accepted behaviour’ for most people, which I have engaged in and enjoyed, but found in the long term to be a distraction from other things that I find more important, like reading, thinking and talking to people. There has to be a genuine sense of going without something, of loss, completion and a fresh start.

Second, it needs to be behaviour that I feel is slightly addictive. Thus, I find myself looking up information on the internet that I would not bother to find out if I had to search through many books to find – the information is too easy to locate and valued less as a result. I find myself answering one-line questions with a lengthy answer, when picking up the telephone might be more productive, and face-to-face conversation would certainly be better.

I find most of my correspondents appear to have so much contact by email that they write very briefly, whereas when communication was by occasional letter those letters were much longer, becoming things in themselves. I feel that contact between people has been reduced to communication a machine could handle, so that nuance, poetry and real thought have been sacrificed for instant gratification. I also feel sucked into discussion of things that really do not concern me, so I spend hours with my laptop without getting on and writing what is really important to me.

Third, it needs to be something that I find morally suspect (car equals pollution, road deaths and climate change; not eating animals was always about avoiding animal cruelty). A whole generation seem inseparable from their smartphones. They seem incapable of real conversation (mental illness is on the rise, especially amongst the young, and loneliness is greater than ever, despite this apparent constant interaction via the machine); taking in fake news and false information; absorbing the world via a machine rather than directly from the world around them – just as if they themselves were computers being fed inputs in order to produce outputs (real life was not like that even thirty years ago); becoming cogs in a machine, bees in a hive, rather than free children of God.

Like all tools, computers are fine until they control us. I would compare what is happening to the human race to the impact of mills and other factories in the industrial revolution, which determined the speed and humdrum nature of daily labour; only the computer has gone a step further and often controls human leisure time as well.

Consider the way the computer is becoming our memory, our teacher and our corrector. We are able to remember far more because we record it in pictures and print. However, the memory is not in our brains, but on our computers or the internet – not lost by a stroke, but by a technological failure. We can know anything at the tap of a few letters, but the lack of effort means we value what we find far less, forget it more quickly, and are constantly looking up facts that really have no relevance to our lives or who we really are. We soon become the servant of the machine rather than its master. Where other machines only forced us to become aligned to their needs in terms of our hand and eye coordination, the computer manipulates our minds to fit into the way it is programmed. How long before the internet becomes a form of consciousness? It will happen, I think, as we slowly lose our own sense of separate consciousness and become part of the internet consciousness.

---

Comments

Please login to add a comment