The problem with computers is that we have become reliant upon them, sometimes in ways that don’t necessarily seem to have made our lives any better. To be more specific, the problem with our mobile PCs, tablets and smartphones is that we can’t seem to put them down.

 

The combined effects of email and various social messaging platforms from Facebook to Twitter have produced a new kind of addiction that today we often call ‘cyber-dependency’. But what kind of effect is this level of electronic connection really having upon our lives and what ‘real world’ experiences are we missing out on?

 

Multi-channel overload

 

The root of the problem is the information accessibility factor that technologists have been working so hard to give us. The idea in concept is that we are supposed to be able to switch across what we call ‘multiple form factors’ and still get access to email and our favourite electronic connection points from games to camera apps and so on.

 

Let’s say leave your car where you’ve been streaming a music track from the Internet and the same song continues on your smartphone as you walk to your house. Inside your house, the TV takes over as the current ‘form factor’ until you move into the kitchen. At which point, your web-connected refrigerator touchscreen catches the stream and keeps you connected.

 

This scenario is already playing out with ebooks, where Amazon allows you to integrate your Kindle book with an Audible audio-book – the book in your hand automatically updates to the page the book in your car stopped at – and the book in your car starts narrating from where your Kindle was last used. The Kindle app on your smartphone is included in the whole seamless experience.

 

Remember the real world?

 

So prevalent has cyber dependency become among all age groups that we humans have been clinically examined to assess the affects of technology upon us. We actually get a pleasurable endorphin release in our brains as we satiate the desire to constant check our smartphones.

 

Equally and conversely, we start to experience stress and anxiety when this access point is not available. A plane with no Wi-Fi, a remote desert region with no cellular coverage… can you imagine the pain?

 

This leads us to a new reality where people are starting to miss out on the real world. More prevalent among millennials, the use of selfie-sticks and self-videoing has become an obsession. People travel thousands of miles to the Grand Canyon in the USA, Wadi Rum in Jordan or even the Pyramids of Egypt and sit recording themselves, rather than watching the changing colours of the rocks during sunset.

 

“It’s very true, we have become addicted to our mobiles. Even when I’m not working I find myself checking almost instinctively. The problem is often that it’s every few minutes, so you don’t really ever learn to disconnect. When I go to a tourist attraction and see people more concerned about what they can put on Facebook or Instagram rather than actually enjoying the moment, I do find that kind of disheartening to be honest. Technology is great, but maybe it’s time for us humans to get better at using it,” commented Kewal Varia, a technology strategist originally hailing from the Gujarat in India.

 

Email, flawed but never bettered

 

Central to this issue is email. The problem with email is that it is a great communications tool, but it is a flawed one. Every email reply we send seems to generate a discussion with multiple threads. When several user accounts are all copied in by CC together, the potential for information overload isn’t far away.

 

Social networks aren’t much better. Most of the time we seem to find ourselves updating posts and messages just for the sake of it, not for any defined purpose connected to some higher level of personal fulfilment.

 

The psychological immune system

 

Life study coaches have told us that humans are conditioned to feeling happy only when things go as we had planned them to. Why is that by 2017 we haven’t been able to get our computers to handle all the mechanics that happen in between life’s important events so we humans can get on with our personal pursuit of happiness?

 

The answer is coming, but it’s coming slowly. Computer based human communication platforms are evolving and email could very well die off, eventually. Many of the new technologies now emerging are based around the concept of dialogue and information-share within a defined community. This often entails the creation of what we call ‘persistent chat rooms’ where discussions are grouped by theme or topic. But we can go even further than community chats.

 

There’s nothing magical about this approach. Essentially this is just a new way of first managing and then subsequently sharing information with more selective tuning. Crucially though, it means we start to analyse, categorise, separate and group information by what are predominantly qualitative (as well as some quantitative) filters. Email on the other hand is just a mostly unfiltered torrent.

 

Selectively tuning out

 

The big question is, can we humans learn to ‘selectively tune’ ourselves away from the electronic communication pipes that now dominate our lives?

 

“I took a week out to attend a yoga club in Cuba this January and it was a complete biological and online detox. There was no Wi-Fi anywhere and if you did find some, it would be as slow as an old ‘dial-up’ connection,” said Funda Cizgenakad, EMEA-based director of Fundamental Communications.

 

“Suddenly my phone became a ‘dumb brick’, or at most a small camera to take around. It was absolute bliss. Conversations with people were no longer about the latest news or something you'd just seen online but much more connected and personal,” she added.

 

So we know that email is like drinking from a firehose i.e. when you turn it on you get the full raw unfiltered power of water flow right in your face. We can only hope that the post-email years will be more like sipping spring water from a tasting menu, in your preferred cup size, at just the right temperature.

 

Email was a really good idea at the time. It first started emerging in the 1960s and 1970s before becoming popularised in the 1980s and eventually ubiquitous by the 1990s with all its social media connection points. But that time has passed and email could leave us one day.

 

We have worked out how to click, collaborate and connect. Now we just need to unlearn a few of those habits and disconnect for our own happiness.