Under your control or not? Internet addictions are real...

Some new studies are out, pointing out the troublesome backside of our connectedness online via e-mail, Facebook, Twitter and texting (SMS in Swedish). A new study concludes that the internet is more addictive than alcohol and nicotine, and I am starting to believe that (I don't have the link to the study yet, will post it when I find it). I have worried about this a long time, and have made a conscious decision not to be active on Facebook, not to have a twitter account, and try to keep the flow of information into and out of my head under my own control.  But in today's world you can't do your job unless you are connected online, and without an e-mail account that you check everyday, your career and job availability would mostly be dead (well, maybe not if you are an artist living in New Hampshire, but I think you know what I mean... :).

I make it harder for me to be or get too addicted by not getting a smartphone, not having the laptop at the breakfast table, and consciously turning off e-mail and Skype during stretches of time at work, but the feeling is still there - "Oh, what is new? What is going on?  Who needs me now?  What cool things am I missing!?"  I believe that this deluge of wanted and unwanted information plays straight into our psychological triggers in our brain.  We get addicted, if we want it or not.  And the more we use it, the more addicted we get.

 (from Toothpaste for dinner, used with permission on this blog)

I teach at a university and cellphone and internet use is not allowed in my classroom.  But 30 seconds before class starts half the class is sitting with their cell phones and earpieces and hangs out online.  They are not present in the moment in the classroom.  After class starts, they put it away, because I do stop the lecture and ask students who text/surf/etc. on the internet if they want to leave the classroom.  So far, nobody has when I asked, everybody just apologies.

Some professors just give up and let the students do whatever they want, but I want to present a counterpoint to the deluge and addiction out there.  If you are in my class you should be focused on the class and the topic, nothing else.  I know this is hard, from my own experience, since I have been through many boring lectures, meetings and seminars in my day.  But if so, then doodle with a pen while listening, don't run to the internet and get totally off-track.

Meetings, which is a whole other subject.  I often sit in meeting at the big university with fancy professors, busy staff, or pompous administrators, and nearly half of them are playing around with their gadgets (mostly Blackberries, iPads or iPhones these days).  It is not only horribly rude to the persons that are trying to get things done, it is also inefficient and leads to longer, and more boring, meetings that take on the feeling that these meetings are unimportant.  If I lead a meeting from now on, I will ask everybody to refrain from any internet use, pay attention to the meeting and focus on solutions, instead of drifting off into unfocused realities.  Senior professors that just got an iPad or iPhone are the worst...

Remember when TV was all bad for you?  Carrying an iPhone with you is a lot worse than having a TV on at home (I do think TV on all the time is bad too).  But the iPhone is there, in your pocket, like a happy pill that you can take as often and as much as you can.  Who can say no?  And when there are free games that become truly addictive, a hundred contacts (that you really don't know), and everything is instant, forever, and shallow - it is not necessarily always a good thing.

The internet and social media could be used in a good way, and often is, but how do we make sure WE are in charge of our time and lives, and not someone else?   Gambling is considered an addition, but I think excessive internet use should be classified as one as well.  The problem is that internet use is EVERYWHERE, and includes kids from 2 years old and upwards. And here I am, blogging about the problems with the internet... :P

(from Toothpaste for dinner, used with permission on this blog)

So, here is my advice.  Turn off your cell phone sometimes.  Never check e-mail or your phone in bed. Read a book.  Insist on being unavailable at times.  Refuse to get addicted, use the internet on your terms.  Focus, focus, focus.  Laugh at funny YouTube videos, blog, and post photos and videos online, when you feel like it, not when you feel like you have to.  Let us enhance the good things about the internet, and not forget that the real things are things you can touch and think about without the help of a screen, like a deer vertebrae in a forest, a good book, making pasta primavera, and creating things that are possible to touch, view, smell.  In 3 months, nobody will care how many friends you have online, but you will care about how many friends you could have a good time with in person at your house.  And that is what really matters.

Don't get me wrong here, I think there are really creative and positive uses for internet resources, it is just the addiction and the lack of focus on real things that gets to me. It is all about the quality of the input to and output from of our brains. There isn't enough thinking in the world anymore. 

OK, enough ranting from me, and here are some articles about this for those of you that want to read even more:

Uppdaterade och sömnlösa (DN.se, in Swedish, "Updated and sleepless")

Why studios need to think about the ethics of social gaming (The Guardian, UK)

Internet addiction test 

Internet addiction disorder 

Attached to Technology and Paying a Price (NY Times article)

Our brains are lying to us

I just read this:

"the human mind is superb at seeing pattern, even when it doesn't exist, [...], and the human mind in contrast often has trouble seeing actual patterns in multidimensional space"  

[Curtis Clark on Taxacom]

...and it is so true.  Examples are sayings such as 'bad things come in three' (they don't, statistically).  Our brain is fooling us at times, and other times, we cannot just grasp the immense patterns in 3-dimensional space and time.  Just try to understand the universe...

Bits and pieces from the internet: senseless and sense edition

The blog This is NOT Junk and Michael Eisen have a great post about senseless, automatic prizing of books on Amazon, leading to the advertised price of over $23 million for a book on Drosophila (fruitflies / bananflugor). Worth reading and pondering. [thanks to OK for finding it]

Your brain morphology might influence if you are conservative or liberal, reports a new study in Current Biology.   (Easy read version here: Science Daily)

Take a look at this map of internet use connections (full article here).  Why are some topics 'dead-ends', such as hydrology, physiology, and social works?  I would think those are strongly linked to other fields.  But remember, this is from how scientists click on links, so maybe these three fields largely keep to themselves?  Biodiversity and philosophy seems to be right in the middle of things, with many connections in different directions. Fascinating, like a starmap, but based on virtual internet data use from real people.  However, this is a 3-D map that has been flattened, so it is a bit hard to interpret. Imagine this as a cloud of dots you could twist and turn, then it might make more sense.


Sensible or senseless?  Felix Gonzalez-Torres' art installation "Untitled" of a heap of candy in a corner at the Art Institute of Chicago. The date of this art piece is 1991, so the candy is 20 years old right now.  What do you think about this?

About Focus...

I have been reading a lot about the challenges and opportunities with modern technology and how it affects our education, brain, politics, lives, and everything else.  I think some of the world's upcoming problems are not just climate change, war, poverty, lack of food, and crazy politics, but also just lack of focus due to massive distraction, especially in the younger generations (under 50 or so). Here are some thoughts that I thought were true and interesting:

Filtering, not remembering, is the most important skill for those who use the Internet. 

I see today's Internet as having three primary, broad consequences: 1) information is no longer stored and retrieved by people, but is managed externally, by the Internet, 2) it is increasingly challenging and important for people to maintain their focus in a world where distractions are available anywhere, and 3) the Internet enables us to talk to and hear from people around the world effortlessly.

Read the full article here:  KNOWLEDGE IS OUT, FOCUS IS IN, AND PEOPLE ARE EVERYWHERE by David Dalrymple

Doodling while listening is OK, say scientists

"People may doodle as a strategy to help themselves concentrate," said study co-author Jackie Andrade, a University of Plymouth psychologist. "We might not be aware that we’re doing it, but it could be a trick that people develop because it helps them from wandering off into a daydream." Read more here.

(Photo and art by red5standingby on Flickr.)

I used to doodle with a pen on a paper when talking on the phone, and I still doodle, during boring meetings mostly. I have been in many boring meetings.  Some people in meetings have a knack for repeating things over and over, saying the obvious, and not listening to what was said just a few minutes before.  They would probably have been better off if they had doodled more. What I doodle?  Oh, grasses, sedges in water, geometric figures, inca temples, coral like shapes, tiny flowers, spirals and diamonds, alpine mountains.... hmmm, sounds like everything is very scientific.  I don't doodle steam engines, horses, faces, or sushi, but I am sure others do.. I wonder how the brain decides what it want to draw, how the things come out through the pen.

The left and right sides of the brain

Recent research results:

Liberals have more gray matter in a part of the brain associated with understanding complexity, while the conservative brain is bigger in the section related to processing fear, said the study on Thursday in Current Biology. 

(link to more info)

How to hear your own voice

Who creates the new leaders and visionaries for our world?

Well, not today's schools, media, and institutions, argues William Deresiewicz in a great article named Solitude and Leadership recently published in the UTNE reader.  I read it this morning, in the sofa with a cup of tea next to me, and there are so many things in it I agree with and would like to quote it.  But I am afraid this post would be too long then, so it is better you just click on the link.

Take the time to read this article. Don't get distracted, just read it, it is important. I promise.

The center pieces of his thoughts are that:

• We have no longer time for peace and quiet in our minds due to overabundance of distractions from TV, internet, cell phones, and text and so on.
• We are not training kids and ourselves to think and envision, only to achieve and become people that can follow rules but not be great leaders.
• We need more nonconformists, more concentration, and more introspection in ourselves to deal with the current problems in the world. 

The article is about America, but I think Europe and other regions have similar issues. We live in a society were everybody has a lack of time (unless you are retired I guess), but maybe we have more a lack of concentration and focus than a lack of time.  The world around us chop up our time into useless little pieces where we no longer have the opportunity to think about a thing long enough to make a solid decision or thought.  Nobody but us can fight this back, individually.  Turn off the phone, e-mail, TV, the cacaphony of social and global noise, and do one thing, such as read a book, cook a meal, go for a walk, plant a seed, or write a paragraph.  I have been thinking about only this for 10 min now, and it feels good to let the mind focus...

Some of the best quotes (read the article for more, and then become a nonconformist so you can help change the world):

"America now has the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen. What we son't have are people who can think for themselves; people who can formulate a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things; people with vision."

"We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place. "

"Thinking isn’t about learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information. It requires concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea of your own.  You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube. "

“Your own reality—for yourself, not for others.” Thinking for yourself means finding yourself, finding your own reality. Here’s the other problem with Facebook and Twitter and the New York Times. When you expose yourself to those things, especially in the constant way that people do now—older people as well as younger people—you are continuously bombarding yourself with a stream of other people’s thoughts. You are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom. In other people’s reality: for others, not for yourself. You are creating a cacophony in which it is impossible to hear your own voice, whether it’s yourself you’re thinking about or anything else. 

Read the whole article by William Deresiewicz here. 

You are charged!

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Old tales (Gamla svansar)

This post is by request from my sister and brother... (and for Sarah too)

When I was in Sweden I found my old writing books from second grade, when I was about 8 years old, and I very much wonder what my teachers really thought about my stories. Talk about lively imagination... Unfortunately they didn't grade each essay. Here is one example:

Originalet på svenska (original in Swedish, med exakt grammatik ur skrivboken):
En aprilmorgon gick Fantomen till livsmedelsaffären för att handla påskmat till sin lata och ilskna lyxhustru, Diana. Hon hade ocksaå bett honom köpa en rulle sytråd för att laga hans strumpbyxor. Med sig hade han Devil, hans gammla sjuka jakthund. Hunden tiggde om leverpastej och nötkakor. Men kakor fick han inte, eftersom han kunde få magplågor då. När Fantomen svängde runt hörnet vid ostdisken halkade han på ett bananskal och slog huvudet i en vetemjölspåse. Han fick en stjärnsmäll. Hans lösgom for ut ur munnen och råkade ge Devil ett bett i vänsterörat. Vid åsynen av blodströmmen från såret kräktes Fantomen upp frukostgröten och svimmade bland toalettpappersrullarna.

Loose translation:
One morning in April the Phantom went to the grocery store to buy Easter food for his lazy and angry luxury wife, Diana. She had also asked him to buy a roll of thread so she could mend his tights. With him he had Devil, his old, sick hunting dog. The dog begged for liverwurst and nut cookies. But he didn't get any cookies, because then he would get stomach pains. When the Phantom turned around a corner by the cheese counter he slipped on a banana peel and hit his head on a wheat flour bag. He saw stars inside his eyes. His loose teeth flew out of his mouth and happened to give Devil a bite in his left ear. When the Phantom saw the blood streaming from the wound, he threw up his breakfast porridge and fainted among the toilet paper rolls.

Notes: The Phantom (Fantomen) is a comic hero, and the stories were translated into Swedish. The nut cookies were probably the ones my grandmother made with hazelnuts, oh, they were delicious. The rest I have no idea where it came from.

For the love of inventiveness

This is a great read by Maira Kalman: Can do about Benjamin Franklin and inventions.

Inventions are not only in mechanics and science, but also food, design, and art of course. Some of my favorite inventions are the cheese slicer, the garden hose, basket weaving, barbecue sauce, digital photography, printed books, words like Andromeda and ivory bill, pepper grinders, and I often wonder who tasted the first smoked fish. Probably someone a long, long time ago, before we really had language, but they invented things already back then. Some fresh fish left over the dying fire by mistake became smoked fish for breakfast. If you discover something inadvertently, is it still a stroke of genius? :)