Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteI'd like to say, "I'm done with the Internet."
However, for writers, photographers, and musicians, not to mention everyone else chatyping online, one cannot be done with it: one may only corral or shape the character and stretches of time spent working on and uploading art, if any, and then time engaged n community with one's cohort, co-hobbyists, co-religionists, co-inhabitants of cyberspace.
And corraling and shaping time are what I'm doing.
More than "time online" may be involved here, although time online may include myriad endeavors, good and sinful or both at once, but in aggregate, they have this common feature: every page, every YouTube clip, each and every Facebook interaction, as advertisers well know, every single web search, fractures time if not slicing open presumptions about privacy, and if that, then that too.
After a while, one wants to get through the meal, not work on its enjoyable contributing parts across time: the shopping list, the shopping, the setting out, and the slicing and dicing and baking, braising, frying, and roasting. That would be too much, and, well, one has to check one's e-mail, or the latest order in transit with UPS, or work one something at the desktop, including working on working.
The cut may go deeper.
There may be, for example, the movie you're about to watch shadowed by all the other potential movies Netflix suggests you watch.
And who has time to watch that movie anyway?
There are so many other things to do -- and we're doing them!
At our computers, or with computing devices, including phones, and online.
Let me not stop with this bleating about info-gluttony and the web's cornucopia:
It has been proven that sedentary lifestyles are an important cause of mortality, morbidity and disabilities. According to preliminary results of a study from WHO on risk factors, sedentary lifestyles are one of the 10 fundamental causes of mortality and disability in the world. Information from that organization reveals that approximately two million deaths can be attributed each year to lack of physical activity. (From LatinSalud.com: http://en.latinsalud.com/articulos/00621.asp).
From Wikipedia:
A sedentary lifestyle and lack of physical activity can contribute to or be a risk factor for:
- Anxiety[3][4][5]
- Cardiovascular disease[6][7]
- Mortality in elderly men by 30% and double the risk in elderly women[8]
- Deep vein thrombosis
- Depression[3][5]
- Diabetes[3]
- Colon cancer[3]
- High blood pressure[3][9]
- Obesity[10][11]
- Osteoporosis[3][12][13]
- Lipid disorders[3]
- Kidney stones
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedentary_lifestyle
While here I'm working on scaring myself (oh: that translates to something like "helping others in similar straits"), ways forward may have their own razor wire, starting with turning the romantic's wan melancholia into something a little more positive and energizing so that for each mouse potato there is something "out there" to go out there too.
I'm fortunate to have some options with music plus a fine community of local musicians with whom to play -- in fact, I think music may yet be the thing that saves me from a completely dismal end -- but one needs more than that, and with age (and serious enough illness plus a kind of circular and silly psychology engaged in this), the challenge may rise some: out for a run, a jog, a walk? How about a pony ride (AKA Mustang) to a decent restaurant and a decent meal where someone else has been paid to list, shop, assemble, slice, dice, bake, braise, fry, and roast?
Now you talkin' my lingo.
That silly psychology: the more quiet the life, it seems the more one wants more quiet; the more one enjoys that good meal out, well, the more sojourns in restaurants one may want.
Sitting still and eating really well: the habit of either really can turn out deadly.
So here I set out two or three continuing problems and issues:
- 1) the natural subdividing of time associated with computers, really cool software, and virtual mind-to-mind opportunities for research and, clinically and formally speaking, engaging with others in something approaching the full suite of mankind's social activities and communicating behavior, all of which may make it difficult to spend three or four hours of a day in thrall to a book or a small project in the arts--we need to focus, and part of "focus" has to do with shutting out (and shutting down) distractions;
- 2) the development of physical lifestyles congruent with the overall investment in electronics for communicating, entertainment, and research, for whether watching market tickers in realtime while managing trades, or attending online events involving realtime chatyping or, coming to us hoi poloi real soon, group Skype, every hour may cheat one of responding to the necessity of enjoying the body in nature--God must bless those who golf, but there are many other things one may do as age climbs;
- and, as with all change, 3) the necessity of producing a higher level of energy or energized state to overcome an inertia defined by the introduction of multiple electronic devices and alterations in physical lifestyles enabled or inspired by them, and that to the effect that they serve us and our health and longevity a great deal more than we serve them!
Want to get away?
I do.
I'm going out for a walk.
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