Unplug, Reconnect with Nature

Aloha!

There's a book out that addresses the issue of our near addiction to being online. The title is "Hamlet's Blackberry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age", by William Powers. In the book the author offers some suggestions to help us manage our relationship with the online world, instead of the online world managing us.

There is some interesting historical material in the book too. For instance, an addiction to being 'connected' does have precedent. People in the past apparently got hooked on checking mail at the post office. And even in Roman times the government was inundated with 'data' in the form of documents.

As Shakespeare would say, nothing new under the sun. It's just a different medium now - the Internet.

In spite of the precedent, I believe we modern people have a cause for concern. In an interview on PBS's The News Hour, Powers shared an encounter he had with some young adults after one of his public lectures. One of the young women he spoke with was in tears and expressed her gratitude toward the author for showing her another, healthier, way of living with technology. What this implies, and we can witness it all around us, is that young people today are so frequently plugged in - via phones, computers, and other devices - that they are living as if they have no other choice.

Powers focuses on how face-to-face relationships suffer when we get too caught up in the online world. I think it goes beyond this issue. Given the precarious state of our natural environment - evidenced in part by human-caused climate change, and in part by the degradation of ecosystems as world population explodes - allowing our young people, who are the future of our country, to live so much of their lives disconnected from interacting with the natural environment, bodes ill for humanity's future on this planet.

The more we abstract our experience from the natural world, the less intimate we are with it, and the less we care - unless Nature creates havoc in our personal lives in the form of storms, floods, droughts, or perhaps even wild animals attacking our pets and children because of our encroachment of wildlands.

Not to sound apocalyptic, but I think if we don't find ways to unplug ourselves more often, we're going to evolve as a species into something that doesn't really belong on this planet anymore. And maybe that's our destiny. But it seems a shame that we compel all the other creatures on the planet to suffer our growing pains as our eyes are glued to a LCD screen.

Wishing you akamai and occasionally unplugged computing.