hi guys,
did you know the term 'digital detox' is a term in the Oxford dictionary as follows,
NOUN
• informal
A period of time during which a person refrains from using electronic devices such as smartphones or computers, regarded as an opportunity to reduce stress or focus on social interaction in the physical world:
break free of your devices and go on a digital detox.
There is also a detox website
http://thedigitaldetox.org/
OMG, there is even a treatment center in central London, that have specialized treatments. http://nightingalehospital.co.uk/condition/technology-addiction/ To me reading the three core elements of 'treatments'!!!!! makes me feel that the addition is not the problem, but a symptom of underlying issues, issues which do not need to be associated with technology. No shame right!!! or is it about people with money with nothing else to spend their time and money on. If people are prepared to pay, why not provide a service. What do u guys think????
tracei xx
Hey Tracei,
ReplyDeleteI didn't even know that there was such a thing as a treatment centre for digital detox, let alone here in London. Well I don't find it too shocking that they are attempting to make money with it, I guess the question in this respect is whether
we consider the dependency on digital devices an actual addiction. On the homepage of the 'American psychological Association' addiction gets defined as follows:
Addiction is a condition in which the body must have a drug to avoid physical and psychological withdrawal symptoms. Addiction’s first stage is dependence, during which the search for a drug dominates an individual’s life. An addict eventually develops tolerance, which forces the person to consume larger and larger doses of the drug to get the same effect.
http://www.apa.org/topics/addiction/
So basically anything that evokes a dependency to the extent that an individual adjusts his or her entire life around it may atleast be regarded as unhealthy and therefore should depending on the extent of the addiction be treated. I believe an underlying question here becomes, why do people need this constant attachment to digital devices? There are several articles online about people dying because they played computer games for such extensive amounts of time that their bodies would not cope with the lack of food, water and movement. Ironically most of the time these games are virtual reality online games such as World of Warcraft, Second Life etc. where players can create a character according to their own preferences, the virtual life becomes more relevant to them than their actual one. This article from 2010, which I found on the Guardian homepage that 'the registered population of online communities such as Second Life and Blue Mars is greater than that of the US and Europe combined'. The question here becomes why does our society prefer an artificial world over the real one and when does the term 'real' become interchangable? If you have ever seen the movie Matrix then you can find a lot of parallels. In the movie the hero gets offered a blue and a red pill one will leave is life in the condition as it is, the other one will open his eyes for reality. He choses the eye opening one and realizes that his entire life is based in a virtual world. While he breaks free from the entrenchment of this virtual reality and liberates himself in order to have a 'real life', our society creates a matrix for itself that is almost as real as our real world.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/aug/22/discover-virtual-worlds-revolution
What a fantastic discovery Tracei!
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