Time spent texting: 10 minutes
Time spent on Facebook: 5 minutes
Time spent on Skype: 40 minutes
Time spent on school work: 80 minutes (1 hour, 20 minutes)
Time spent watching videos: 60 minutes
Time spent playing games: 20 minutes
"Not too bad," I thought, "but today was an exception." I was instructed to track the ways that I use technology over the span of three days, and I chose to start on a Wednesday, which is a day that I spend at school. A more accurate representation would come tomorrow, when I would spend all day at home.
February 5, 2015
Time spent texting: 5 minutes
Time spent on Facebook: 10 minutes
Time spent on Skype: 80 minutes (1 hour, 20 minutes)
Time spent doing school work: 30 minutes
Time spent watching videos: 250 minutes (4 hours, 10 minutes)
Time spent gaming: 140 minutes (2 hours, 20 minutes)
I couldn't help but to laugh as I logged my time gaming. Despite being an avid gamer, I hadn't spent much time playing games that week. Instead, as we can easily see here, I was marathoning a show. Still, my technology use didn't look too shameful yet.
February 6, 2015
Time spent texting: 5 minutes
Time spent on Facebook: 5 minutes
Time spent on Skype: 60 minutes (1 hour)
Time spent doing school work: 20 minutes
Time spent watching videos: 480 minutes (8 hours)
Time spent gaming: 0 minutes
By the end of the day on Friday, I was shocked to see that I had spent 8 hours watching (and finishing) my show. I watched an entire season in just two days, which is admittedly common for me, and probably a bit common among other people as well.
Working past that mild embarrassment, I quickly realized that I'm not much of a social technology user. People always talk about how they see others ignoring their friends for their cellphones, but I never understood those stories because 1) I don't do that, and 2) I don't think I've ever seen anyone do that. But, the narrative is so common that authors like Nicolas Carrr and speakers like Sherry Turkle use them in their criticisms of frequent web-use, so I suppose that there's no sense in me arguing against it. For now, I'll assume that I'm an exception to the rule.
What I do spend my web-time on, though, is gaming and watching shows - and I do a lot of that. (Because the lifetime stats of gaming are more readily available to me than the lifetime stats of watching shows, I'll focus on that in this post.) In fact, I could accurately tell you how many hours I've spent in most games because those games actually keep the records for me. These logs can even be a point of pride for gamers. I've logged 357 hours on my main character in Guild Wars 2 alone, with the total time spent playing that game nearly reaching 800 hours.
But what have I sacrificed for this? Well, in order to fully address this question, I'll need to get a little personal here. I have a long, difficult history with anxiety and depression. (And yes, these conditions were evident before I became a gamer.) My issues can get so extreme, in fact, that I'm prone to dissociation, which means that under a great deal of emotional stress, I detach myself from my emotions, and sometimes even my current experiences.
What my dissociation means in the context of gaming is that, if I'm not careful, I can truly lose myself in a game. This means that I'm more prone to running to games when I get depressed or anxious, rather than addressing the feelings head-on. Rather than providing me relief though, this only serves to "bottle up" my emotions until they eventually force their way out. Technology on the whole is actually great for these avoidance tactics: it's always available to us, the internet is nearly endless, and we can control a great deal of what we're exposed to.
In her TED Talk addressing avid technology use, Turkle asserted that one reason that we're so attracted to communicating online is that we can do so on our own terms. We can edit our messages with ease, sometimes even after being sent. On a social level, that means that we can edit our self-presentations, and this sense of control is comforting. But, what Turkle argues is that feeding into this desire can be dangerous to us because it can inhibit our face-to-face communication skills.
Because my personal experiences with internet use so strongly favor non-social activities, I may not have the best insight here, but I can relate to its theme through my experiences with dissociation. Once a habit is developed, it can be hard to break, and that becomes especially true when that habit comes more easily through the use of technology. I'm not always thinking about what I'm doing when I'm loading up a game rather than dealing with my emotions, and I don't need to think much to double-click an icon and launch myself into a different world. Because these habits - both dissociating and gaming - have been developed over time, I can just function on auto-pilot before even processing that I'm upset. This becomes very toxic for me because my negative feelings only continue to fester until they finally explode, and I'm left feeling even worse than before.
Let me remind you here that I'm not speaking theoretically. I know this from personal experience: technology helps enable my unhealthy habits. But, I want you to absorb this statement carefully. It does not mean that my habits are caused by my technology use. It does not mean that my technology use is a negative thing. It simply means that one of the many ways that I dissociate is made easier through my use of technology. In this way, technology use is no different from sleeping (another thing I do in excess when I dissociate). Technology use and sleep are not bad things because they can be associated with a bad thing: they are in fact very good on their own. This is very important to understand.
When I was seeing one of my therapists, I tearfully said, "I love playing games. I don't want to use them to dissociate, but I still want to be able to play them." Because dissociation and gaming seemed so closely related in that moment, it seemed impossible for me to separate them. My therapist replied, "You can do that. You just have to re-learn how." I learned, even unconsciously, how to dissociate through gaming, so that meant that I could learn how to separate the two things as well. It would take bravery, introspection, and dedication - but it was possible. It seems to me that other habits made easier through technology could be untangled in the same way.
While my dissociation habits are different from communication habits, I think that the process of habituation and learning works in the same way, regardless. I certainly agree with the sentiment that heavy technology use can be harmful. Just as I can't control the world around me like I prefer to in a game, people can't control the people around them like they prefer to on Facebook. Allowing ourselves to get lost in these simulations can indeed be very harmful to us. But, that doesn't mean that the simulations themselves are strictly bad or harmful. Rather, I think that it means that our next challenge is to be mindful of our technology use, and to teach ourselves about how much is too much. If I learned how to work around my tendency to dissociate when playing games, then I have full confidence that others can work around their tendency to forgo face-to-face communication for texting.
