{"id":9331,"date":"2022-01-25T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-01-25T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.meetup.com\/blog\/?p=9331"},"modified":"2022-01-25T09:10:13","modified_gmt":"2022-01-25T14:10:13","slug":"recording-unplugging-in-a-virtual-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.meetup.com\/blog\/recording-unplugging-in-a-virtual-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Recording: Unplugging in a Virtual World"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Many of us have a complicated relationship with the internet. While websites and applications have made it easier than ever to communicate, buy goods, and receive services, many of us long for the slowed pace of pre-internet days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Watch this recording with Pamela Paul, Editor of The New York Times Book Review and author of <em>100 Things We\u2019ve Lost to the Internet<\/em> (<a href=\"http:\/\/prh.com\/paul)\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">prh.com\/paul)<\/a> as she shares powerful insights into both the profound and the seemingly trivial things we\u2019ve lost\u2014from punctuation to vacation postcards. She\u2019ll dig into the larger repercussions of our digital lives including weaker memories, feelings of listlessness brought on by endless scrolling, and the utter destruction of privacy. Learn Pamela\u2019s advice for reclaiming a bit of the real world and lessons on fostering connection and community.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Recording: Unplugging in a Virtual World\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/TV9DScms1-s?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-main-takeaways-on-unplugging\">Main Takeaways on Unplugging: <\/h2>\n\n\n\n<ul><li>&#8220;I think in terms of technology every development technologically speaking is a new product, a new service, a new software, and it&#8217;s something that we can decide whether or not we want to adopt. It&#8217;s sold to us very heavily and the idea is that if you exert any conscious decision making into do I actually need that, do I want that, do I have to do that? There&#8217;s a label that&#8217;s left on you, which is you&#8217;re afraid of change or you&#8217;re not, you know, this is not 21st century thinking. Whereas in reality, it&#8217;s like any product that might be introduced in 2022. It doesn&#8217;t mean that I&#8217;m not a 21st century person, it just means that I have made a choice. I think we sometimes complete the idea of new products and services with progress, not always progress. So, you know, I think that we need to disentangle the idea of technological change necessarily being the equivalent to progress, and then also the progress is necessarily to the good because there&#8217;s a lot of things that are progressing like climate change is progressing. That doesn&#8217;t mean it&#8217;s getting better.&#8221;<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul><li>&#8220;Certain things to make life simpler and easier and sometimes more efficient. I am really efficient online, I can toggle like seven windows at once, and respond to, you know, a million notifications and tax and that&#8217;s highly efficient. Now, at the end of the day, does that make my life really easier? Not really. One of the things I think about too is that we&#8217;re having so many interactions in a given day. There&#8217;s an illustration in my book  on the chapter about lost productivity, which I think is something that we&#8217;ve all lost. where it&#8217;s  someone playing whack a mole and and that is like what our days feel like when you&#8217;re very efficient, you can deal with 1,000,001 messages. The other thing though that that isn&#8217;t captured in that is that there&#8217;s a lot of information in those messages and all that information is coming in. And the other thing that&#8217;s coming in is the emotional engagement that&#8217;s a lot for human being to metabolize in a given day. In a regular day with the internet, you are absorbing like deaths of people&#8217;s family members that you peripherally saw on Facebook, really nasty tweets that you absorbed out of the corner of your eyes, some of them to you, some of them to people. There&#8217;s just a whole bigger world of emotional engagement that we&#8217;re all involved in and and I think that&#8217;s one of the reasons why it&#8217;s so hard to go to sleep at night because human beings haven&#8217;t really evolved for our minds to take on that much emotional echo. You can find 30 or 40 things to obsess about or be upset about or worry about just from a single day of online interactions.&#8221;<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul><li>&#8220;One thing to think about when you&#8217;re debating whether to get something or not is, do I want this thing? Do I need this thing? Am I actually happy with what I&#8217;m using now? Am I okay with what I&#8217;m using? Now, if you are okay with what you have now, do you necessarily need to get the new thing? So in my life, for example, one decision I&#8217;ve made it is I&#8217;m not going to do Venmo or Zelle, I am just going to write checks, or if we go out to dinner rather than split the bill by using some kind of funds transfer, I made the decision like I&#8217;ll treat you this time, and then you can treat me the next time. That&#8217;s actually nicer than you&#8217;re also creating an opportunity where you know you&#8217;re being generous to someone in the moment and then offering expectation that there&#8217;ll be a next time. So that&#8217;s one way to think about things.&#8221;<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-top-q-a-and-resources\">Top Q&amp;A and Resources: <\/h2>\n\n\n\n<ul><li><strong>Can you share practical ways we can unplug in a virtual world?<\/strong><ul><li>Remember that you do have control. You do have control and, another way for the parents that are out there, they often like limit how much their kids are on the phone how dependent their kids are on screens. One thing to remember and again of course it&#8217;s up to the individual parent depends on your kids, and all of that. It&#8217;s your choice, you can limit the amount that your kids are on the phone. You don&#8217;t have to get your kids, a phone when everyone else is getting a phone. One thing that people will say is, well I got my child to phone because they&#8217;re gonna be walking to school by themselves. You have to remember, for those of us who were around we did all that without carrying the Internet, and most of us are still here. So, it&#8217;s about seizing control but also being able to let go, maybe I don&#8217;t need to know where my child is all the time, maybe I can try to live with having that outside of my control outside of my immediate knowledge. My parents did it with us. Maybe I can do it with my child. So I think that&#8217;s another word to kind of think carefully about control, and where you want to hold on to it with regards to technology and where you want to be able to let go of it.<\/li><\/ul><\/li><li><strong>What&#8217;s your take on cell phone addiction? I stay up to 6am to interact in messenger groups. Where does online need for socialization become a problem\/nuisance?<\/strong><ul><li>So you know addiction is tricky word and I&#8217;m not a psychologist and I don&#8217;t know the DSM, the diagnostic manual for disorders has all kinds of rules about what&#8217;s an addiction and what&#8217;s the compulsion and what the habit and I can&#8217;t really say with any authority what&#8217;s an addiction, but I do think that people recognize addictive compulsive or bad habits behaviors with the Internet. One thing that I always recommend, it&#8217;s up to the individual, but I don&#8217;t sleep with my phone. I know that seems radical, but I have an old fashioned alarm clock, it operates with a battery. With my phone outside the room there have been a number of studies that show when your phone is out of the room when it&#8217;s out of sight that you enjoy what you&#8217;re doing more and you sleep better. <\/li><\/ul><\/li><li><strong>We have never been more connected but never so disconnected. Thoughts?<\/strong><ul><li> One of the chapters is called Solitude, because I think it&#8217;s really hard to feel solitude. I&#8217;m going to think about it for a moment in a positive light, solitude can be really useful. Solitude, can be good, it can be good to just sit with yourself and to just be alone and I think that&#8217;s hard to recoup, that&#8217;s hard to capture and it&#8217;s hard to recuperate because it&#8217;s no longer a kind of resting state. The baseline is no longer that assumption that when I go off into the woods I am alone, you&#8217;re not alone, and to capture that solitude, it requires like a very conscious mind shift because in fact you have hundreds, thousands of people knocking at your door at that very moment the doors just on your phone  sending notifications. You have to very deliberately decide I am going to keep them out. We are more connected to get back to the comment, but it can also feel very lonely, right, it can feel really lonely if you post something that you think is absolutely juicy and wonderful and original and witty and then like three people like it. So it sort of feels like you&#8217;re connected and yet you notice an absence of connection. <\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Pamela&#8217;s Book:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul><li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.penguinrandomhouse.com\/books\/622522\/100-things-weve-lost-to-the-internet-by-pamela-paul\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>100 Things We&#8217;ve Lost to the Internet<\/em><\/a><\/li><\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<div class=\"post-excerpt\"><p>Do you long for the slowed pace of pre-internet days? Learn Pamela Paul\u2019s advice for reclaiming a bit of the real world and lessons on fostering connection and community.<\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":9333,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[127],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Recording: Unplugging in a Virtual World - Meetup Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.meetup.com\/blog\/recording-unplugging-in-a-virtual-world\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Recording: Unplugging in a Virtual World - Meetup Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Do you long for the slowed pace of pre-internet days? 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