Nomophobia, email apnea and truth

“I feel so disconnected and lost” a student said to me amidst the Blackberry (BB) outage this week. Another told me she was getting more and more depressed about the outage and “couldn’t concentrate because I keep wondering when it will come back!” There have been a number of reports which express people’s emotional state caused by the outage, one tweet said “Outrage at outage, I could kill”. Many have quipped that we rely too much on technology and times like this remind us of just how vulnerable we have become when technology lets us down. Others have joked that, for a few days now, people have actually had to – shock horror – talk to each other face to face! Apple icon, Steve Jobs, has been “blamed” for the outage; in his new celestial abode he has (apparently) prayed against BB and his prayers have certainly been heard – even Tutu’s prayers are seemingly not as fast and efficient as his! It’s a good time to reflect on our online life – or the lack thereof – and its effects.

The students I bumped into were clearly distracted and irritable with the BB saga – so was I. Other people expressed frustration and anger on radio and social media platforms like Facebook and twitter at the outage. I threatened, more than once, to ditch my BB and head for an Android or iPhone. It’s a big deal, for most of us, that we do not have access to the world through our BB’s. It is, some claim, having a negative effect on business. So much of our way of being has become intricately connected to technology.

This week I understood clearly what William Powers in his book Hamlet’s Blackberry means when he talks of “nomophobia”. This sounds quite funny but actually is a disorder which we only become aware of and consider seriously when there is an outage like the BB one. Powers describes nomophobia “as the fear of being out of mobile phone contact”. He also describes other conditions like “email apnea” – “…a form of shallow breathing while checking email that, in some cases, leads to an increase in stress related disease”. Our digital neuroses are no more obvious than when things like BB just do not work and we are forced to be on a digital diet. It is also a moment in which we can, hopefully, step back and attempt an honest evaluation of ourselves and society.

Is our online life – digital maximalism – reducing our ability to live meaningful lives? If the lack of digital connection makes us feel disconnected and lost does it really mean that we are losing something of what it means to be human – depth in thought, feeling, ability to relate to others directly and ultimately the truth about who and what we are? The expectation is that we are to be constantly connected, for many of us disconnecting has become very difficult – as we have seen these last few days. But are our lives so busy and scrambled because we are always scrambling to respond to the latest incoming message? Many of us often say just how busy we are and how little time we have. Technology has not only impacted on our humanness and psychology but also our spirituality. Powers points out that all our lives have taken on an outward orientation and therefore we spend less and less time looking inwards and this has, as a result, consequences we seldom realize: we just never stop and so our inner lives are forced out of existence.

Our awareness of our “inner life” has rapidly been reduced by our outward focus and, not surprisingly, when the outward focus blurs we feel lost and restless – there is no “back-up system” and therefore anger, frustration, loss and depression colonize our inner selves. There is a sobering truth that seems to emerge about our online lives when we are forcefully disconnected: technology has empowered us but it has also limited us in ways we are not conscious of. It is slowly eroding our ability to realize we need an inner life, a spiritual life.

Media theorist, Marshall McLuhan, looked at what hidden changes technology brought about. He suggests that with every extension comes an amputation and it is the amputations he worries about. The extensions are obvious but the amputations are not McLuhan warns. The BB, for example, has extended us in ways which enable us to “chat” to people anywhere in the world at anytime. The amputation? They have encouraged a culture in which we are frequently not really present to those who are physically with us because we have the ability to engage in BBM conversations with a person who is somewhere else in the world and online with us at that moment. We amputate the ability to engage in real, meaningful communication face to face. Extensions and amputations: what have we really gained? What have we really lost?

I wonder if one of our amputations is not truth – the truth about ourselves: our identities, our ability to be in relationship with others and really relate, our ability to live the spiritual life and perhaps even our ability to really live life to the full. Are we really able to live the truth of who we are and, dare I suggest enjoy life, when we are bound by relentless information and the expectation that we will act on this information immediately which means we are always rushing to the next thing and allow so much to be amputated. Neil Postman said that technology has introduced a form of cultural AIDS – Anti Information Deficiency Syndrome. Is that the truth we do not dare admit?

There is another amputation this whole saga has made poignant for me: the loss of our ability to be truthful in our business dealings. More and more the lack of truth surrounds us and, no doubt, engulfs us as individuals. Whether it is the local municipal manager, the government, church leaders, the SABC or RIM, the truth never sets us free. Perhaps that’s what irritates me the most: why not tell us (the paying user in case you did not notice!) the real truth about why we are experiencing this outage. The way that BB has handled this whole saga has been a PR disaster and has opened the door for various conspiracy theories – a global shut-down to limit the mobilization of protests and protesters who want to “Occupy Wall Street”; BB overload and systems crash because of limited infrastructure; BB financial meltdown etc. Why not just tell us the truth? What we were eventually told was to little too late.

Technology has shaped a new way of being human and of living in community but it certainly hasn’t made life as simple as it claims. It has, undoubtedly, made the truth about us and our relationships rather fuzzy. What annoys me the most: being disconnected or not being told the truth? It’s certainly the latter but I know too that it’s not simply truth “out there” because it is also the truth about my very self and the way I chose to live – controlled by machines rather than one which uses machines? Food for thought.

That said, I am happy that my BB is working again – even if not a hundred percent yet!