Day Five

Life without free access to the Internet continues to be a struggle. For one thing, I'm finding it almost impossible to check my e-mail only twice per day. I'm happy to report that this is not due to an obsessive curiosity about new messages, but rather simply because it's the vehicle I most often use for communication. I've never been a huge phone person, and most of the people I see every week for playdates and the like are people who I e-mail.

Yesterday I broke the rule several times just because I really had to contact people. I needed to e-mail Eva's physical therapist, and I needed to check on the status of some social plans. I suppose if I'd been completely AWOL with my friends, they would call me eventually, but I don't want to be unnecessarily hard to contact.

I'm hereby relaxing the e-mail rule for times when I have a clear need to send or read a message. I'm enough of a big girl to know the difference between that and random time-killing; I just have to stay honest about it.

Oh, and in the interest of full disclosure, I did log in to Facebook for five seconds this morning, but it was to check on the first name of the new daughter of one of my former coworkers. She came by with her kids this morning, and I didn't want to be rude and ask the baby's name. Frivolous? Perhaps, but I think it relates enough to using technology with a clear, defined purpose that I'm letting it slide.

In the end, I hope that's what I get out of this-- a habit of using the computer for "real" purposes, rather than "fake" ones. I'm not sure I need to be constantly updating my Twitter status every time I drink a cup of tea or eat a bagel. Does Facebook really care when I'm doing laundry? Is it necessary to maintain an identity on an online forum when I could be putting the time spent on "virtual" friendships into the real friends I already have? (The forum question is a sticky one, though, since I have actually *met* one of those "virtual" forum people, and I don't want to lose touch with her entirely. And I do value the people I "know" on there. It's just far too easy to be sucked into reading and responding to thread after thread when I could be spending time doing so many other things than clicking a mouse.)

Oh, and one more unsettling thing-- I'd been trying to avoid thinking about little sticky things that happened when I last saw my family, and it turns out that's a lot easier to do with the virtual crack that is teh Interwebs. As soon as I unplugged myself, that stuff started taking up a lot more brainspace. That's a good thing, though. I hadn't realized I'd been using the computer to "self medicate," if you will, but I totally get it now. Ugh, but obviously this stuff needs to work itself out, and I intend to let it.

I anticipate a lot more studies in the future about the detrimental effects of technology saturation. As I slowly but surely uncover how it's affecting me, I'm beginning to wonder just how temporary I should make this little "experiment." In the very least, I'm going to find it hard to eventually enforce Eva's screen time if my own is unregulated.

Lots to think about, it seems.