• On Saturday I was in Oklahoma City, attending the annual assembly of Western District Conference of Mennonite Church USA. That morning I led a workshop (organizers called it a "learning community") on spiritual practices. I'd barely begun when someone's cell phone went off. I said (to laughter), "Maybe a spiritual practice could be to turn off our cell phones."
• On Wednesday afternoon a friend of ours who moved to New Zealand in January stopped by for a visit, one of many stops during her two-week or so visit back to see family and friends. As we talked about the differences between New Zealand and here, she mentioned that there people are more active, less sedentary, less obese. And, she added, less obsessed with cell phones. She had visited a friend (here in the U.S.) who spent much of the time they were together texting. And there weren't others in the room; just the two of them.
• Later that evening, I went to our local grocery store to pick up something. On my way to the checkout counter, I passed a young boy, maybe 7 or 8 years old, walking behind his mother. He held a device that held his attention. As I passed him I saw that he was playing some kind of game on it. He seemed oblivious to others around him.
Then I came upon this article in the latest Newsweek called "Is the Onslaught Making Us Crazy?" by Tony Dokoupil.
I won't take the time to go through the article thoroughly but merely highlight some of its points. (Read it if you can.)
First some stats:
• the average teen processes 3,700 texts per month;
• one-third of smart phone users go online before getting out of bed;
• in a poll of millennials (13- to 30-year-olds), most said they felt "exhausted" by their online activities;
• the brains of Internet addicts scan a lot like the brains of drug and alcohol addicts.
Have you ever heard of "phantom-vibration syndrome"? That's when everyday cell phone users report feeling their phone vibrate when in fact nothing is happening.
Dokoupil writes that "research is now making it clear that the Internet is not 'just' another delivery system. It is creating a whole new mental environment, a digital state of nature where the human mind becomes a spinning instrument panel, and few people will survive unscathed."
Susan Greenfield, a pharmacology professor at Oxford University, says, "This is an issue as important and unprecedented as climate change."
Peter Whybrow, the director of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, says "the computer is like electronic cocaine" (there's our title), fueling cycles of mania followed by depressive stretches.
Dokoupil goes on to refer to several different studies that show that overuse of the Web actually rewires the brain. A Chinese study showed that Internet addiction has led to "shrinkage of 10 to 20 percent in the area of the brain responsible for processing of speech, memory, motor control, emotion, sensory and other information."
The new Diagnostic and Statistics Manual of Mental Disorders, due to be released next year, will include for the first time Internet Addiction Disorder.
One psychiatrist, Elias Aboujaoude, points out that ADHD diagnoses have risen 66 percent in the last decade and adds, "There's little doubt we're becoming more impulsive."
Maybe that's enough. If we're dealing with addiction, then it won't be easy to change people's behavior. But in terms of spirituality, let me just go back to that incident in my workshop. We laughed, but maybe limiting our use of the Internet should be a spiritual practice. That may at least be a place to start.
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