Real Estate Investor Magazine South Africa June 2013 | Page 80

TECH TALK

BY RUSSELL BENNETT

Socially
Switched On
Go digital or go home

O

n May 1, 2013, self-diagnosed “burntout” tech writer Paul Miller ended his
self-imposed 1 year hiatus from the
Internet. After 365 days of stepping away from
the digital lifestyle which today we all see as
“normal life”, Miller was ready to conclude the
series of articles he’d continued to write for The
Verge, with what many hoped could be damning
evidence of the dramatically negative effects of
digital living on the human body and soul.
That didn’t happen though. Instead of
returning to the fold with trepidation at
being plugged back in to the Web, Miller
appears to be quite keen to dive back into the
overflow of information and social interaction
and pressure that the Internet represents.
And while the man writes lucidly and with
impressive insight into the human condition,
his wrap conclusively fails to highlight the
evils of the Web with newfound and certain
k nowledge of precisely how this globa l
resource impacts our every day existence.
For a year, he had disconnected all his
devices from the Web, and even switched
back to a non Internet-enabled ‘phone to avoid
the rising surge of mobile as a Web medium’.
He’d expected this freedom from his perceived
digital shackles to allow him a chance to
discover the tr ue Pau l Mil ler cowering
inside his information-overloaded mind, to
dramatically develop his “real-world” persona,
perhaps even have the time to write a couple of
books in his newfound spare time. But in the
end, none of this really happened.

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June 2013 SA Real Estate Investor

To summarise, Miller found that it isn’t the
everyday practicalities of life that are most
affected by disconnecting. The ability to just
search for contact details and fire off an email
to the discovered party, or to price-check every
product or service against its competitors for the
best deal of the day, or even to find directions
to your next meeting with a quick browse
through Google Maps. All of that, he found,
still worked just as well using regular paperor voice-based mechanisms. A touch slower at
times of course, but not a real hindrance.
Contrary to popular belief, the one aspect
of Miller’s life which did suffer was his social
circle. While he may have become better at
connecting with members of his direct family
and even strangers on the street, his actual circle
of friends steadily dwindled as geographical
distance grew and the ability to circumvent this
separation through digital channe ls remained
out of bounds.
This real-world account f lies in the face
of ever y thing which so-called “common
wisdom” surmises the digital age is doing
to us as a species. We’re told the Internet has
(with particular reference to our kids), in no
particular order: systematically eroded our
social interaction capacity, increased our
average weight due to the sedentary lifestyle it
enables, disconnected us from the “real world”
of fresh air and the great outdoors, and dulled
our minds by bombarding us with useless
information and by the availability of a worlds’
worth of knowledge just a Google search away.

Miller’s findings, on the other hand, paint a
far more realistic picture. It’s true, for the first
few months, this subject did lose weight by
leading a more active and outdoor-oriented
lifestyle, but as the novelty faded and boredom
set in once more even this change receded and
the old couch-potato that he’d been hoping to
escape emerged again.
As for social interaction, Miller himself
concludes w ith a single line of digita lage wisdom. “Facebook friends might not
necessarily be real, but they’re a whole lot better
than no friends at all.”
The fact is, our society has migrated to the
digital realm. To be a part of this society, with
all associated benefits and drawbacks, is to live
a digital lifestyle. Where a youth of sitting
in isolation playing computer games used to
be the quintessential definition of antisocial
behaviour, today’s society all but dictates that
a digital medium is required to participate in
modern societal circles.
While the world ’s best researchers have
wasted their time examining the effects of the
digital explosion on our old lifestyles and the
perceived norms of this lifestyle, a new lifestyle
has taken over global society, and without
digital communications participating in this
modern society has become all but impossible.
Not quite the much-anticipated outcome of
this intriguing experiment, but nevertheless an
emphatic one.

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