Work It, Dad!
with Avi Spivack
Hi, I'm Avi, and I try to put the work and the dad together, with mild success. This is all about trying to give you a view from what it looks like on the dad-man's side of the world, and I hope you find my ruminations humorous because I try not to take myself too seriously.
Hi, my name is Avi and I am a digital addict.
There, I said it.
I had been trying to fight the truth for awhile (the first step in the process is denial, right?), but with spring right around the corner (yes, it must be) I felt it was time to come clean and admit my faults (well, one of them at least).
My blackberry is an appendage.
I check my gmail account at least 192 times a day (I estimate that I check my email every 5 minutes during the hours that I am awake, say 7 am - 11 pm, sometimes more; so that’s 16 hours, or 960 minutes, and every 5 minutes is 192 times, just to show you that I really care).
Now, granted, I am not currently employed, so this increases the need to check my email frequently, to see which of the multitude of companies will be offering me a job at 10:55 pm on a Thursday night (but who’s counting anyway).
So not only is my career based around the use of a computer and a blackberry, which sees me emailing to endless people well into the night, but I really, truly, cannot seem to go more than 4 minutes without feeling the urge to check my email - JUST IN CASE THE WORLD IS ABOUT TO EXPLODE AND I MIGHT BE ABLE TO SAVE IT. Really, is anything in life so important?
(One disclosure: while I am watching “Lost” I can typically resist the urge.)
So, of course, this digital addiction bothers me on two levels: first, I don’t actually want to nurse this addiction, and second, I am honestly worried that my daughter - and her whole generation for that matter - is going to grow up with computer chips embedded in their brains and maybe all of this digital connectivity stuff isn’t necessarily a good thing.
Beyond all of the “children spend too much time online and not interacting face-to-face with real people and that is bad” commentary, what will happen to us, and our children, when everything - and I mean everything - is digitally interconnected and all I have to do to check my email is close my eyes and have the “email/ESP” messages beamed into the frontal lobe of my brain?
What do you think? And are you an addict, too?
Yes, I am an addict. But i can quit any time! Well, not really. My daughter’s laptop caught a virus, and we may have to loan her mine while hers is in the shop. I am panicked, yes, panicked! at the idea of sharing a computer with Husband and son for any length of time. I can’t possibly check my email and twitter and plurk updates often enough! Maybe I need a Blackberry…
Daisy | March 7th, 2009 at 11:51 pm
Addicted here too…occasionally I have a flash back (flash forward?) to those people on the “ship” in the movie WALL-E…then I go outside and play with my kids. It all works out.
Karla E | March 12th, 2009 at 3:12 am