After a weekend of beautiful weather during which I spent most of my time inside on the computer–doing academic research, preparing materials for teaching, checking in on Facebook, shopping, reading the news, watching Hulu–I’m thinking about the relationship between our online interactions and our face-to-face interactions.
Around 2004 and 2005, I spent a lot of time traveling for both professional and personal reasons: San Diego, San Francisco, Boston, London, Lyons. Two things really struck me during those months. First, every one of those cities had a couple of blocks downtown that were pretty much interchangeable, featuring the same internationally-recognized shops and businesses. And second, I found myself relying on the familiarity of my online habits to keep from getting homesick. No matter where I was, I could still read the same newspapers, still check the same blogs, still email or instant message with the same people. In short, I could use my digital connections to feel like I’d never left home. There’s something wonderful about this, but there’s also something pretty sad. I don’t want my life to be lived inside a cocoon of my own making where nothing unfamiliar or challenging ever intrudes. Keeping myself hooked up to the electronic umbilical cord, however, threatens to do just that. And I think it’s worthwhile for everyone to assess from time to time their use of digital community and communication.
In a subsequent post, I’ll have more to say about these issues and their connection to academic life and work, but for now I just want to note a few relevant links.
What about you, faithful readers? Do you ever feel like you need to take a break from the online world?
3 Comments
That’s an interesting question George, and I’ve had very similar experiences. The thing that I try to do is to use my online connections to provide a low level of familiarity, while taking steps to ensure that I experience wherever I am as much as possible. Rather than avoiding online time, I find it much more useful to avoid those identical two block downtown sections – which exist everywhere now and are horrible! I don’t mind having some time away from the net either, but the biggest problem I have is being able to come off of that break and say to myself ‘ok, I don’t actually have to catch up on the 300 rss posts, 150 facebook updates and 2 billion tweets that occured while I was gone’. I still work my way through them, which is probably stupid…
nice list of articles, george, and a very good question raised: when and how do we take time off from being connected? the article i wrote in the ny times magazine on my facebook party is now part of a book that has just been published: The Peep Diaries: How We’re Learning to Love Watch Ourselves and Our Neighbors. it deals with some of the consequences of privileging virtual life over flesh life. Check it out and let me know what you think. best hal.
I guess I never really feel homesick when I am on the road. I’ll often skip paying for wifi when traveling simply because I’m too busy to bother with more than a cursory blog scan. I’d like to explore the cities I visit more than I do, and often get away from the identical downtowns at least for meals (though access to public transportation may affect this).
I think the nice thing about Facebook and Twitter is that they are always there and continue to run efficiently without me, so that when I do step back in, I don’t feel like I’m missing anything.
2 Trackbacks
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Ethan Watrall, ProfHacker. ProfHacker said: New at ProfHacker: @GeorgeOnline on “logging on, logging off”: http://bit.ly/1snVFN [...]
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by ProfHacker: New at ProfHacker: @GeorgeOnline on “logging on, logging off”: http://bit.ly/1snVFN...