The Trouble with Screens

 The basic trouble with being online is that it speaks to and amplifies only a very small part of human being-ness. No matter how many "real" qualities of humanness are dramatized in a Netflix series or shared with followers through Instagram stories, FB posts, or promised through the purchase of something, etc -- even if these feel in the moment like a path to connect us with humanity, ordinariness, simplicity and ease, care, love, connectedness, "true selves" -- the fact that we "consume" it through a screen means we aren't able to feel or understand or experience it anything close to what the IRL experience would be like. IRL experiences, with all of their messiness, pain, discomfort, are our only hope to grow and change in the container of and in relation to the natural world, which is where we live and in doing so, gets revealed to us its laws, opportunities and constraints. Online has created a new container, while seemingly limitless, is actually very limited, without an anchor in the physical world. It is almost a perfectly externalized dream world of our minds.

And like repeatedly using only 30 of our 600 muscles, our screen consumption means we are developing a fitness -- and preference-- for a certain kind of narrow, limited experience, that makes you think it's a rich limitless experience, while not quite conscious of how limited it is. 

And so the more time we spend online, the more our real life human being selves are unconsciously training to build a life that conforms to this narrow collection of human ideas/expression that we can easily capture and show online to others--and then this becomes our frame of mind, an accelerating, self-reinforcing loop that further narrows how we come to know the human experience and who we want to be. It can mislead people to believe that the world they occupy is not grounded in the physical world but in the narrow way being online has taught them to experience themselves. This leads to more and more extreme trade-offs, where destruction of vital habitats, air pollution, C02 emissions, death and torture of animals, exploitation of child labor, support of transnational organized crime and conflict are exchanged for everyday conveniences that are seen and experienced as necessary to sustain what is considered our quality of life. 

In response to questions:

The way people's experience narrows can vary *content* wise -- one person's conspiracy habit is another's Netflix habit is another's gaming habit is another's yuck habit (or most likely a combination), which can give the online experience an "unlimited" seeming quality -- but we are actually having an extremely limited experience, because the online experience doesn't allow for a human being to realize there are other parts of being human. 

When the internet first started, our IRL was the frame of reference for our online lives, but now our online lives are becoming the frame of reference for our IRL and online lives. 

Of course, socialization itself is a narrowing experience, fraught and destructive in its own way. 

The extreme narrowing that the heavy online use produces can come through other life experiences --traumatic experiences, mental illness, substance abuse -- but the speed and spread of this narrowing is unprecedented. 

The narrowing ability of online can help people feel connected, happy, etc, by focusing their attention on what they want to feel and not on real pain/trauma/bad thinking that happen/is happening IRL. But that is accompanied by a disconnection from the physical/natural world. This is not meant to glorify the physical/natural world over a person's ability to live a happy life; we have to acknowledge this and ask more questions about it.

The internet began as a way to make things faster and easier for people to do/get something, and there is nothing wrong with making things faster and easier. The problem is that we don't recognize it as a process of narrowing our experience and participate it it unexamined. Most of us inhabit this online world for almost all of our waking hours-- from world leaders to kids in school - this world that operates as its guiding principle: faster, easier, unlimited, etc-- and what is the consequence of expecting that to apply to our physical world.

Again, this is not to glorify the unpredictability and harshness of the natural/physical world over the needs of people. Humans have been building barriers between themselves and the natural world since we walked into caves, and for good reason (we also have always created distractions from it). But the online environment is arguably the most highly successful barrier-distraction imaginable. 

Examples of the human experiences that being online amplifies (or artificially inflates its importance relative to that experience's importance in relation to life-supporting and sustaining actions that exist in the physical/natural environment): looking and sounding good, feeling good, feeling bad, envious, angry, being entertained/entertaining, desiring and getting things easily (whether it be to obtain something, or for righting a wrong, or fixing something), comedy, tragedy, satisfying endings or cliffhangers, good news, bad news, sense of injustice, possibility of crime, redemption, relating and being relatable etc. 

(And then there are the combos: cute but mean, perfect things that make you feel bad, stylish bad things that make you feel good,  attractive bad news, bad news that turns out good, bad news that looks good, etc.)