I remember the day—many moons back when I was in high school—when the school administration announced that they were going to sanction a certain outdoor spot behind the school as a “smoking area.” Now, not being a smoker, it didn’t really matter much to me. (I mean, my parents were smokers and at home I tried to breathe as little as possible.) But there were some kids who were beside themselves with joy over the fact that they didn’t have to sneak off somewhere to light up or try and go all day without at least one quick cig to sate their addictive yearnings.
Well, sneaking off to the bathroom for a quick puff may be in decline today, but there are other reasons in these tech-laden days to slink off. An article from techcrunch.com titled “Technology Is The New Smoking” explored the idea that indeed our Internet addiction is giving nicotine a run for its money. Alexia Tsotsis, the article’s author, advanced the opinion that smoking and our new high tech addictions are pretty comparible:
You're at an outing or a dinner table with friends but itching to check your email or Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or Google+ or Yammer or what ever digital hit of serotonin you prefer. Have you ever 'gone to the bathroom' in order to check email or come up with a socially appropriate excuse to pull out your smartphone just so you can check your @ replies on Twitter?
She sites a couple studies which suggest that some students were hooked on cell phones, social media and the Internet, and when deprived of those connections for even a short period of time they would display symptoms similar to drug and alcohol addiction.
One study from the UK’s Leeds University, found serious evidence of that link. Researchers surveyed 1,000 people after they were offline for a full 24 hours and found that more than half—53%—said they were feeling “upset” about being deprived of online access and 40% said that they felt lonely. “Participants described the digital detox akin to quitting drinking or smoking and one even said it was like having his hand chopped off (!),” wrote Tsotsis.
There was a similar 24-hour media deprivation study from the University of Maryland that reflected the same sentiment and included a number of comments from the college age participants.
“When I couldn’t communicate with my friends,” one student reported, “I felt so lonely as if I was in a small cage on an island.”
“I literally didn’t know what to do with myself,” said another respondent. “Going down to the kitchen to pointlessly look in the cupboards became a regular routine, as did getting a drink.”
“It was amazing to me though how easily programmed my fingers were to instantly start typing “f-a-c-e” in the search bar,” another participant wrote. “It’s now muscle memory, or instinctual, to log into Facebook as the first step of Internet browsing.”
And one girl’s comments went so far as to report that she was “itching like a crackhead.”
Now you may be rolling your eyes at this idea. But there are some out there who suggest that there’s no way to break out of this dependence and the only natural outcome is that someday we’ll be connected to the Internet 24 hours a day. In fact, author Michio Kaku, in the book Physics of the Future, suggested that within 100 years, being permanently and perpetually connected through some kind of internal or external device will be the new normal.
And here we thought secondhand smoke was a problem.
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