A Likely Story | Information addiction

From e-mail to Facebook to Twitter to The Huffington Post to The New York Times and back to e-mail just to start again. Twice. Thrice. Hell, even four times in a span of 15 minutes.

This sounds like a problem, and one that I undoubtedly share with more than a couple of my Penn peeps. How can anyone remain unaffected by the desire for new information that social media and minute-to-minute news updates have made us crave?

I used to be able to sit still and concentrate on the task at hand without feeling any need to check for notifications. Those days are long gone.

An informative 2003 article in the Times explained that my current inability to stay offline has something to do with getting “a hit of pleasure, stimulation and escape” from new information and that this addiction “takes the same pathway as our drugs of abuse and pleasure.” So who else is scared?

Technology is ubiquitous. Facebook leads to procrastination. We check our e-mails far too often. And Twitter leads to shorter attention spans.

Okay, so I’m not exactly cracking a new code here by highlighting the downside of high-speed internet and tagging it as a profoundly negative byproduct of our modern-day connectedness.

Nevertheless, I can’t help but conclude that, for all of the outcries and op-eds already published, the problem is as flagrant and persistent as ever. One needs only to go to class or sit in a meeting held in a place with internet access to confirm it.

On the one hand, how could we expect anything different? We are required to mediate a great deal of our lives through computers and iPhones and BlackBerrys.

There is no getting around it: we are YouTube kids and are enamored by the wit of our tweets. Facebook has undeniable perks too — it allows you to keep up with that friend from high school and makes you feel good about going to a better school than that jerk of a guy. I get the charm of it, even if I often wish I didn’t.

But when no conversation can take place without someone staring down at an iPhone, something has gone too far.

I am not suggesting that we should just follow in Henry David Thoreau’s footsteps and leave it all behind, of course.

But I do believe that we would be well-advised to consider whether this need to log in is hindering our ability, as he would put it, “to live deliberately.” I must recognize that this impulse often determines the way I spend a scary amount of time.

I, like any other addict, sometimes consume new information unintentionally and against my better judgment. Do I really need to see those drunken Facebook photos of people I can’t stand?

To make matters even worse, what seems to be especially scary is that this is so often time spent alone. The act of being with people in the I-am-close-enough-to-squeeze-your-arm way of our ancestors is, perhaps, the greatest victim of our weakness for information.

Have we really come to believe that a “poke” or a “like” carries any sort of real value? Seeing a green dot next to someone’s name on Facebook chat does not make me feel as if I am in the company of friends, it makes me feel as though I am getting a poor substitute for their real and complete presence.

It bothers me, not only because they’re not physically there but because I am almost certain that, like me, they are too busy multitasking to be with me in any significant way.

I have no definitive answer but I am quite sure of this: we would be better off trading some updates for a little more time together ­— the old-fashioned, offline way.

Sara Brenes-Akerman is a College junior from San José, Costa Rica. Her e-mail address is brenesakerman@theDP.com. A Likely Story appears every Wednesday.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.