Premium ContentClick on Premium Content on the Featured navigation bar for information.
Tom Murray is spending these days unplugged, in digital detox. He's trying to distance himself from the virtual world and reconnect with the real one, where people talk face to face and don't leap to answer every electronic chirp. You might say he has unfriended himself.
“I gave up Facebook for Lent,” the Omahan said.
For Murray, 38 -- who “wasn't a huge user” but admitted logging onto the social networking site as many as five times a day for updates -- the step was a logical way to bend his relationships back toward the traditional.
He has joined a 21st-century revolt small, poky and not very likely to win over the masses, but a revolt nonetheless. Some of the revolutionaries call it the Slow Media Movement, likening it to Slow Food, the backlash against wolfed-down convenience meals.
Slow Media, they say, is a backlash against the proliferation of rapid-fire technologies texting, voice mail, smart phones, Twitter, Facebook, video games, television, e-mail, to name a few that can tether people to gizmos 24 hours a day, robbing time from real conversation, contemplation or walks in the park. Their battle cry might be: “Workers of the world, unplug!”
Just as Slow Foodies say that eating should be more than cramming the contents of a box or can into your gullet, Slow Media champions argue that communication, news and entertainment ought to be consumed deliberately and thoughtfully, not just at the highest speed possible.
Their gurus are cultural critics and historians who say technology is enemy as well as friend, reshaping society in unintended ways that aren't always kind to human needs.
Yet Slow Media-ites bristle at the suggestion that they are anti-technology -- or even anti-broadband.
“We are not Luddites,” said Jennifer Rauch, a professor of journalism and mass communication at Long Island University, referring to 19th-century artisans known for wrecking British factories in a vain attempt to stave off the Industrial Revolution.
Instead, she said, the movement attracts people who feel “that some sort of boundaries need to be set”; that technologies should be chosen, not embraced blindly; should serve, not be served.
“In the past six months it seems to really be taking off,” mainly via the Internet, said Rauch, who writes a blog about the movement. To scoffers who see irony in such a high-tech organizing method, she counters that it illustrates the point: Slow Media is about using technology wisely, not rejecting it. And the Internet is the way to find like-minded people nowadays.
Other sprouting signs of the movement:
--Individual self-denial. Whether people choose a Facebook fast, like Murray's, or limits on their texting or TV, they are motivated by a sense that too much has somehow become too much. Rauch said her students who try a “one-day digital detox” no electronic media for 24 hours often rediscover things they loved as kids, such as browsing a newspaper or playing a musical instrument. Others, though, are chastised by friends or bosses who insist on staying connected 24/7.
--News media notice. In a recent National Public Radio piece on Slow Media, correspondent Sally Herships began by lamenting that “every night my boyfriend brings his iPhone to bed.” Slowies, as she dubbed them, are pushing back against societal pressure to be connected all the time.
--Facebook groups. Even the Web site that caters to the obsessively chatty has sprouted clubs dedicated to Slow Media, although perhaps no surprise they've attracted only a few dozen members so far.
“It forced us to talk to each other more,” senior guard D'Andre Bell told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Hewitt described “the most chatter I'd heard in the back of the bus all year. It was like the old days when I was playing.”
--Broader rumblings. Around the industrialized world, “a lot of different movements about slowing down” are afoot, all generally aimed at reducing the pace of life and dependence on media, said David Corbin, a University of Nebraska at Omaha health education professor. He teaches about them, he said, in his “very popular” stress management classes.
--Opposition. Critics such as author Maria Bustillos say bring on the speed. “The growing advance of knowledge, the tantalizing proximity of answers to all our questions, the new ability to share and synthesize our knowledge, almost instantly we're so lucky to be experiencing all this,” she writes for Awl, a Web site about culture based in New York. “If the price is more anxiety, then let me wind up like the Tasmanian Devil, just a blur of anxiety.”
--An ever-new supply of targets. You don't agree that texting and Twittering and e-mailing are distorting personal relationships? Try the social networking site ChatRoulette.com. Log on with a webcam-equipped computer and be randomly paired with another user anywhere in the world. You stare at each other. You trade remarks until one of you becomes bored enough to click “Next.” Then it's on to the next random partner kind of like Internet dating except you see the person rejecting you.
--Generational gappage. More and more, the marker between young and non-young is not clothes or music or hair. It's media. For instance, about 75 percent of the 18-to-30 age group say they use the Internet daily, while only 40 percent of those 65 and older do, according to a Pew Research Center survey of last summer. And texting? It's 87 percent vs. 11 percent.
Some analysts, said Rauch, the Long Island University professor, describe this as a gap between “digital natives” and “digital immigrants.” Natives are those born into the world of modern media; immigrants were born into an earlier time.
It's a metaphor the natives prefer, Rauch said. It implies a sense of superiority, that their brains, their tastes and their lifestyles are better. Immigrants, meanwhile, pine for lost traditions such as the 40-hour workweek or the notion of one's “own time,” she said.
Slow Media's missionaries find themselves teaching across this gap.
Corbin, who has led stress management classes at UNO for a quarter-century, said student antsiness is an obstacle now. Attention spans are shortened, tasks multiplied, distractions more insistent.
“Mindfulness,” or doing all things deliberately, is what he urges. “It's a matter of balance” and making wise choices, he said. “Technology has always been a two-edged sword. ... Fire can burn down a building or heat it.”
Patrick Friman, a clinical psychologist at Boys Town, said techno-gluttony is stunting too many people's capacity for relationships, both kids and adults.
“It is frustrating. I think people are fundamentally ruining the quality of their lives. ... We are social beings,” he said. Overusing electronic media “almost violates one of the design features of the human species.”
Slow Media? “I want to be the mayor of that movement,” he said.
Rauch, in New York, plans a dramatic teachable moment. This fall she'll start a strict analog diet: no media that didn't exist before, say, 1985. No Internet. No cell phones. No Tivo or iPods. After four months of that, she'll organize a course, “Digital Disenchantment and High-Tech Hype.”
She wants students to grasp the historical context of what's happening now, to glimpse a disappearing way of life, such as weekends and evenings that are one's own. She'll discuss the American love of novelty and cover social critics such as Neil Postman, whose book “Technopoly” says “it is inescapable that every culture must negotiate with technology, whether it does so intelligently or not.”
“I do realize,” Rauch said, “that I'm swimming against the tide and probably preaching to the converted.”
Nevertheless, Slow Media activists hope to “spur more public reflection about how digital communication influences our lives and our relationships, and not always for the better,” she said. Media themselves give the impression that “most people love gadgets and there's something wrong with you if you don't. But there could be a lot of people who are skeptical. ...
“I want to let people concerned about the downside ... know that they're not alone and invite them to join this conversation about our culture.”
Futile? Perhaps. Then again, she said, “ten years ago, few would have guessed that Slow Food would become so popular, so fast. And Slow Media could do the same.”
So far, it's working for Murray, who before leaving Facebook a little over a month ago organized a group of fellow ascetics on the Web site, bidding them an online farewell and urging: “Let's try relating like real people!”
The Omaha father of two has not suffered withdrawal pangs.
“It's been fine,” he said. “I haven't really missed it.” The incredulous e-mails from friends have tapered off, and he has become more aware of the value of conversation, both face to face and by phone.
After Lent is over, he plans to maintain a tight rein on his Facebooking, restricting himself to perhaps one log-in a day, in the evening.
“The philosophy of why I gave it up I don't want to leave behind.”
Contact the writer:
444-1140, roger.buddenberg@owh.com
Copyright ©2012 Omaha World-Herald®. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, displayed or redistributed for any purpose without permission from the Omaha World-Herald.
