Navigating Through the New Normal
We are all travelling around the world-wide-web regularly updating our digital footprint as we go. Discovering new sites, uploading significant moments, expanding social circles and speaking a whole new language of the internet. Welcome to the Digital Age, where our seating postures turn into backaches, trick or treating no longer wants candies but collects cookies, and the continuous debate of healthy screen time usage. We basically live, breathe and think with our technology and this is the new normal.
We certainly traverse the digital landscape daily and as our day unfolds we listen to our keys scream “tak-tak-tak” or the mouse squirm “tlik tlik tlik.” Are we immune to the sound of constant typing? Or the even the “tiiiiiiing” sound you hear across the room when you receive a message? The small habitual actions associated with web interactions are extraordinarily effective in repurposing our neural circuitry, therefore influencing changes in our physical behaviour, writes Katherine Hayles.
Increased distractions, hyper-reading, short attention spans are all habits that have formed around our modern-day digital lives. Nicholas Carr in his work, ‘What the internet is doing to our brains’, argues that these changes are imperilling our ability to concentrate leading to superficial thought processes and introducing a general decline in our intellectual capacity. These hierarchal technological superstructures influence our behaviour and our language.
Taking selfies, which at one point was questionable is now the new normal. Along with physically moving to ‘catch that good lighting’ or shouting ‘play my shower playlist on shuffle’ to an inanimate device. Even running around on city streets, flashing our phones in broad daylight to finish a game is all generally accepted behaviour, often overlooked as casual banter or simply considered as “chill.”
Our daily lives are spammed with technological advances and targeted advertisements that form the foundation of the digital playground on which we all interact. The age of digitization has revolutionized the way we ‘do’ everything as opposed to the way we previously ‘did’ everything. Creating an interesting overlap between the two cultural paradigms that create implications which have a deep-rooted psychological impact and influence our epigenetic code.
Digital Media disrupts our behavioural patterns and alters the mundane aspect of our everyday actions by causing us to react quicker and communicate faster. Katherine Hayles writes that these environmental changes have significant neurological consequences.
We roll out of our beds in the morning and the first thing check is our screen. A shift in our biological clock is caused by poor sleep habits. Sometimes we sleep cuddling our phones and we even bend over backwards to reach that power cable. We are all prone to one, if not all of these unavoidable tech-induced habits.
We stream, capture, update, upload, share, grind, link, verify, save, trash and troll. Habits are creative anticipations based on past repetitions which map out our historical future. Wendy Chung writes, through habits users become their machines. We create new habits that overwrite our old ones and we do so with rapid acceleration.
This is the new normal. Digital media is reformatting our interior lives as platform and individual become inseparable. Social Networking becomes identical with ‘social’ itself. The digital media detox was a popular trend that surfaced not too long ago. Many frustrated users who believed that screens were the cause of their effusive habits took to boycotting their screen use and replacing that with more mindful habits.
However, mindfulness is something that is slowly cultivated and not suddenly downloaded. Is it possible to become more mindful through and with our technology? The COVID-19 pandemic sheds an interesting light on how the internet could be argued as a fundamental human right. The virus outbreak has caused people to revisit how they interact with their media and possibly introduced more positives than negatives. People are connecting, creating, teaching, even singing together and the force keeping our sanity intact and citizens at home is the charm of our screens.
Although our need to constantly stay updated, stay on the grind and stay connected is snowballing. Our habits are subtly transforming every minute, and the question here is, what will become the new normal when things are sent back to the previous normal?
Or will there ever be a return to the previous normal? What will our new reality look like? Perhaps, in a year from today, the consequence of our current actions will establish the basis of our future rhythms and habits.
