The Idea Blog

This is a question I’ve asked myself a lot lately. Just the other day Lyn Rollins and I were commiserating about how today’s new stuff sucks our time and diverts us from what we may have wanted or needed to accomplish when the day began.

The timing of this article from The Wall Street Journal was coincidental and relevant.

“The ultimate form of progress … is learning to decide what is working and what is not; and working at this pace, emailing at this frantic rate, is pleasing very few of us. It is encroaching on parts of our lives that should be separate or sacred, altering our minds and our ability to know our world, encouraging a further distancing from our bodies and our natures and our communities. We can change this; we have to change it. Of course email is good for many things; that has never been in dispute. But we need to learn to use it far more sparingly, with far less dependency, if we are to gain control of our lives.”

The author then offers this: “It is time to launch a manifesto for a slow communication movement, a push back against the machines and the forces that encourage us to remain connected to them…. If the technology is to be used for the betterment of human life, we must reassert that the Internet and its virtual information space is not a world unto itself but a supplement to our existing world, where the following three statements are self-evident.”

And those three statements can take you to a self-affirming place, especially if you agree to adhere to them. Here’s the link again. If you feel you are being managed by your email and the internet, this could be a good first step to retaking control.