The Screens that Own Me

I’m sitting here in the living room - shifting my eyes between NBA playing on the TV, a friend’s messages on my smartphone, the new apps on my tablet, and this blog post on my PC. Add to that the Super Mario game running on my Nintendo DS and the magazine article I was browsing on my Kindle and things become mind-boggling. This is the way life works now. These screens have come to dominate my life.

These screens emanate a digital bubble where everything is instant. A whole world at the mercy of our fingertips. Any information that I fancy can be gleaned at an instant. (I just googled the definition of the word glean) Friendships can be maintained with 13 letters and a punctuation mark: “H-A-P-P-Y B-I-R-T-H-D-A-Y!”, an event that the system already helped us remember. No matter what mood we’re in, there is an endless abundance of entertainment options in a hundred different languages. We can play games with people whose countries we can’t even spell. I know many people who find more excitement in downloading movies that in watching them. This bubble is a paradise for instant gratification.

It used to be that we have to actively log in to our PCs to start accessing our emails and favorite websites. No longer. With the advent and mass adoption of the new screens such as smartphones and tablets, the digital bubble becomes ever more addictive and inescapable. In this paradigm, there is no such thing as activities, only bombardments. We can rarely focus our cognitive spotlights on one or even two screens without feeling like we’re wasting time. In the course of writing this post alone, I’ve sent 6 text messages, played Temple Run while waiting for a Youtube video to load, and refreshed my Facebook newsfeed 11 times… It’s a never-ending treadmill and yet we keep clicking, refreshing… We can never get enough.

The screens of modern life have saved lives and shrunk the world. But they have also shortened attention spans and isolated people. I know I have to be careful of the immense power of technology, but I spend over 90% of my waking hours with these screens. I live and breathe in the digital bubble and there’s no going back. I bought these gadgets and they make me happy; I own them, yes, but why do I feel like they own me?