All Saints Presbyterian Church

Breakfast can wait

We've posted several things about technology and how it's changing our interactions in the world. I suppose our approach has been to share things we find compelling. Usually what's compelling about them is that they sound so familiar. So, the other morning when I read Breakfast Can Wait. The Day's First Stop is Online, on my laptop...over a bowl of cereal, I knew the author was on to something.

"Technology has shaken up plenty of life’s routines, but for many people it has completely altered the once predictable rituals at the start of the day.

This is morning in America in the Internet age. After six to eight hours of network deprivation — also known as sleep — people are increasingly waking up and lunging for cellphones and laptops, sometimes even before swinging their legs to the floor and tending to more biologically urgent activities.

'It used to be you woke up, went to the bathroom, maybe brushed your teeth and picked up the newspaper,' said Naomi S. Baron, a professor of linguistics at American University, who has written about technology’s push into everyday life. 'But what we do first now has changed dramatically. I’ll be the first to admit: the first thing I do is check my e-mail.'"

Do you log on to the internet first thing in the morning? Do you worry if you don't? Are you concerned that your children interact more with screens than with people? Might that be true of you?

Everywhere and nowhere

I’m not that old. Some would even say young. Just turned 33. And yet I was a junior in college when I sent my first email. Around that time, a close friend explained that it was possible to see images (not just text!) on a computer screen. Mind-blowing. At the time (1998), I wrote all my papers on the 9 inch black and white screen provided by my trusty Mac Classic; which (to my knowledge) had no online capability. I trekked to the computer science building on campus to send my sporadic emails using this new-fangled thing called the Internet.

There was a sense of lightness and adventure about the whole endeavor. It was like discovering a vast network of mazes under your house. Where would they lead? The times they were a-changin’ and flying cars were clearly right around the corner.

Cut to 10 years later, and that network of mazes turns out to be planet-sized. Unanswered emails mount up daily, we carry miniature computers in our pockets, surf the net at stoplights and somehow that lightness and adventure has dissipated. Now, I feel an actual physical weight when I open my email and see the strings of messages demanding reply. I’ll spend an entire afternoon cleaning out my inbox, like it’s my garage. But unlike the garage, the work requires that my body remain stagnant, while my mind flits through hundreds (thousands?) of screen images: storing, categorizing, and destroying things that exist only in a virtual reality.

The Internet has the power to give me a job or a date; to be my TV, my movie theatre, my newspaper, my telephone, my shopping mall, my stereo, my garage sale… my life. Its existence is a foregone conclusion like telephones or cars. We can barely (if at all) imagine our lives without it. Yet unlike telephones or cars, we can’t touch it, clean it, throw it, break it, or lose it. It’s just there. Always.