Let me make a confession: I kinda like media and technology. I work with it, I play with it, I write about it for a living. We live in an amazing time, filled with gadgets and entertainment options inconceivable when I was a little boy. A decade ago, the Internet was a relatively new plaything. Facebook and Twitter were unheard of and the iPhone wasn’t even a gleam in Steve Jobs’ eye. Yes, our world has problems. But when you look at our age and squint just right, our days look like something out of a utopian science fiction novel, filled with possibility and promise. And while we caution y’all about the perils of technology, we should never lose sight that ours is a time filled with wonder.
But sometimes, it gets to be too much.
When the world changes as fast as it does, it can be hard to keep up. All these gadgets require attention and energy, and it can begin to feel that we’re no longer using our machines, but rather, they’re using us: We type and text and update our Facebook pages, we “surf” and “tweet” and “stream” and run 24/7 and, before you know it, it’s August 13, and summer’s over before we fully knew it was here. And we think to ourselves … how long as it been since I went hiking? Drank iced tea on the porch? Spent a day doing … nothing?
Maybe you are better than I am about keeping our modern distractions at bay. Sometimes, I need a reminder that I don’t need to check e-mail hourly or tote my cell phone around constantly. So sometime very soon, I think this Plugged In writer is going to unplug himself — go where the televisions are snowy and the cell reception’s spotty, a place where my family can put down their iPods and stow their laptops and walk and talk and laugh.
Technology, like I said, can be pretty cool. But sometimes we need a reminder that there’s an even cooler world out there, full of things that don’t need electrical sockets or Wi-Fi to work. Sometimes we need to unplug, if only for a time.
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