Last year I went on holiday to Tobago. For ten days, I felt like my umbilical cord to the world had been severed. For the first time in years I found myself in a place where I could not connect to the Internet. Worse still, my mobile phone could not pick up a signal. I was well and truly disconnected. At first I felt lost, I wandered around like a part of me was missing, but then I remembered what it felt like to be free of the constant need to be available, to be in touch with friends, family and “buddies”. It was wonderful. Tobago is a beautiful island and for once I was able to relax and switch off completely.
The moment I arrived back in Gatwick, the literal moment the doors of the plane opened, I switched my phone on — as did most of my fellow passengers, creating an instant cacophony of ring tones. What a thrill! My phone flashed and buzzed in excitement as text messages and voice mail arrived. And when I reached home, the moment I was through the door, without even thinking about it, I switched my computer on, connected to the Internet and checked my mail. I was back. My name flashed on the screen: “Iman is available”, my buddy list loaded and I saw my friends listed one by one, their icons lighting up like little beacons. My fingertips literally tingled in anticipation. It was at that instant that I realized that my sister was right, I had indeed become addicted to e-mail.
“Addicted to e-mail”, it sounds so self-indulgent: How can anyone be addicted to a method of communication? But I had to admit there was something in it. E-mail has been a powerful tool for me. It is the method of communication that is most perfectly suited to my personality and my life. I am naturally reserved. In face-to-face communications it takes me time to come out of my shell. Quite often I am mistakenly taken to be “placid”, much to the amusement of my family and close friends. But by e-mail, I am able to express myself without reservation. Then of course there is the convenience. My extended family is scattered round the planet and many of my friends live not only in a different postcode but in a different continent. E-mail has enabled me to stay in touch in a way I could not have dreamt of back in my university days.
The problem with e-mail is that it requires discipline. When we were on dial-up, e-mail was something I did once a day, reading and responding, it was straightforward. But now, we have broad-band, we have instant alerts and most addictively for me, we have instant messaging.
It took me a while to get into “chat”. At first, I found it rather frustrating, it took ten minutes to have a conversation you could have on the phone in one. But when I quit my job and started to write, chat became my savior. I was spending days at a time alone in my flat, staring at my computer screen, constructing my novel.
I found the solitude necessary but hard. That is when I became hooked on chat. At any one time I would have at least one chat screen open. I had people I could check in with as my day progressed and they gave me the constant encouragement I needed.
Somehow, it grew from being enabling to being disabling. The first thing I did when I woke up was check my mail. If for some reason my connection was down, I would become short-tempered and irritable. Sitting at dinner, I would sneak my phone out of my handbag every few minutes to check whether I had received any messages. At the cinema, as soon as the credits began running, I would switch my phone back on and wait for that little buzz that would let me know that someone had thought of me.
I had become dependent on being constantly connected.
What upset me the most about this dependency is that at times I felt like I had the IQ of an orangutan. I would be trying to write something but my mind would be attending to the two “chats” I was also conducting in the corner of my screen or I would be pulled away from my train of thought by the sudden flash of an envelope on my screen. It was that same feeling I get when I watch MTV. Those constantly changing images, my mind spinning with too many thoughts at once and unable to focus on any one narrative.
I decided the time had come to install some discipline. I began having “unplugged” Sundays when I would not switch my computer or my phone on. I started to switch my phone off when out for dinner. I had at least one “library” hour every day when I switched everything off and sat in silence focusing on my work. Slowly I got my intelligence back.
But all of this was done with a certain sense of shame. I felt that there must be something intrinsically wrong with me to have been so easily swept into this vortex. That was until I began to notice how common it was. Apparently there is a name for this addiction, this need to be “always on”. Psychologists have termed it “infomania” and in a recent study they found that having your mind constantly on stand-by for the next e-mail, text message or phone call is more damaging to intelligence than smoking marijuana!
— Iman Kurdi is a Saudi writer living in London. “mail to:[email protected]” [email protected]
