Time to Tune Out

London

RESEARCHING a family memoir, I recently read the magazine of my father’s high school in Johannesburg from the year he graduated, 1938. An editorial said: “The stresses set up by the social changes wrought by the advent of technology are straining the structure of civilization beyond the limits of tolerance.”

It continued: “The machine has brought men face to face as never before in history. Paris and Berlin are closer today than neighboring villages were in the Middle Ages. In one sense distance has been annihilated. We speed on the wings of the wind and carry in our hands weapons more dreadful than the lightning.”

This was written more than a half-century before the popularization of the Internet. It is important to cut off from time to time not least because we are not the first humans to believe the world has sped up and hyperconnected to a point where distance has been eliminated. Too often we confuse activity and movement with accomplishment and fulfillment. More may be gained through a pause.

One of life’s great riddles is determining what changes and what does not. Di Lampedusa famously observed that, “For things to remain the same, everything must change.”

We tend to overstate what has changed. The fundamental instincts and urges of our natures remain constant. Social media did not invent the need to be loved or the fear of being unloved. They just revealed them in new ways.

I wrote last week about how oversharing and status anxiety, two great scourges of the modern world, are turning human beings into crazed dogs chasing their tails. Feeling underprized? Overshare on Facebook or Twitter. I overshare therefore I am.

Broadly, there was a generational divide in the reaction. Younger readers tended to see an attack on social media by some 20th-century dude. Older readers tended to nod in agreement.

To be clear, I love Twitter. It is the culture of oversharing and status anxiety that disturbs me. And that is inseparable from the grip of social media.

I started out in journalism at a news agency. Twitter is like a wire service on steroids where you can cherry-pick input from the smartest people you know. It is a feast where you generally get to choose what is on the table and where you do not have to sit through some interminable speech over dessert. It is also a battering ram pointed at the closed systems that turned that old 20th century into hell for so many.

But like Facebook, Twitter can be addictive in ways that may provide brief solace but militate against respect of our deeper natures. There is too much noise, too little silence. To share, that once beautiful verb, has become an awful emotional splurge.

The friend-follower conceits are brilliant marketing tools designed to play on insecurities. Who does not want more friends and more followers? Who does not feel the sleight of being unfriended or unfollowed, a settling of scores more impersonal than a duel and perhaps crueler for that?

Joleen Grussing wrote to thank me for the oversharing column and allowed me to pass along her feelings: “It articulated feelings about social media that led me to drop off of Facebook and stay off it, after having been quite an active participant due to the art world’s crush on Facebook — being able to converse with the likes of Jerry Saltz and significant artists I never would have met otherwise was quite a musk-like attractant. But — for all the reasons you stated in your opinion piece — and a few more — I began to feel a sort of psycho-emotional nausea over even the things I myself would post. Over the way moments in life became more significant at times for the way they presented themselves as perfect photo-ops or anecdotes to be shared on Facebook, rather than as things to be experienced in and of themselves. It was as if there were two parallel realities at all times in my consciousness.”

She went on: “Now, I am back to reading books when I would have been Facebooking. I talk to folks at the café I frequent. People have started calling me on the phone again to catch up because they don’t know what is going on with me otherwise. I have a hunch that being DISconnected is on its way to being the new trend.”

So here’s to doses of disconnection in 2013. Get out of the cross hairs of your devices from time to time. Drink experience unfiltered by hyperconnection. Gaze with patience. Listen through silences. Let your longings breathe.

Somewhere deep inside everyone is the thing that makes them tick. The thing is it is often well hidden. The psyche builds layers of protection around people’s most vulnerable traits, which may be closely linked to their precious essence. Social media build layers of distraction from that essence. If people believed in 1938 that distance had been annihilated, there is time in 2013 to put a little between you and the onrushing world.