Computers Narrow Our Minds

My eyes are currently very tired from the hours of homework I have on my computer/iPad. In the past week, I’ve must’ve logged onto my iPad a hundred times and my computer a thousand. This may just be me complaining about my privilege, but hey, that’s means I’m checking it, right? Anyway, I noticed something very peculiar about using the iPad for homework. When I had to write something down or annotate a PDF, I had to zoom in. Nothing special right? Well, all of this zooming in has made me forget about the bigger picture.

Before using the iPad, I took notes on paper, as I’m sure everyone did at some point. They weren’t neat notes, and I didn’t use them to study, but whatever. I encoded the information in my head from writing it by hand. Everyone does this, right? Okay. But if you look back at your notes, you can see the big picture, the entire sheet. On the iPad, you can’t do that. You can only see a little square whose borders you have decided and sometimes, you can’t even see the whole page when you zoom out.

So what has this done for me? Well, in some ways, it’s been good. I can focus on one thing at a time, something my little brother’s television programs advocates for. But I can’t step back to see what I’ve created/recorded. I can’t visualize the entire page in my head.

Switching to the iPad hasn’t impacted my grades by a whole lot, but it has impacted my productivity. Fortunately, I’ve still been able to prioritize and get things done, even if it means burdening my family a little bit. I’ve been reading less, and I’m only starting to get back into at least four books a month.

So do yourself a favor. Do what my English teacher likes to mention every once in a while, something to the New York Times has to allude to in every Sunday Review: unplug. I’m trying to do it more often, and it’s helped my eyes. Without your eyes, what could you focus on?

(I apologize for the unexpected hiatus for the past two weeks)

On Documentation

I don’t have a snapchat. I barely use my instagram anymore. I primarily reblog posts on tumblr. I only watch videos on youtube. My output on the internet is far less than what I am consuming, and I think I’m okay with that.

Nowadays, we are pressured to show every bit of ourselves and be as revealing as possible of our personal miseries and daily conflicts. Pictures of awesome sunsets are often shared with even the most distant of colleagues, and beautiful moments of our families or alternately intimate moments are just content to be shared. Everything in our lives is not copyrighted and we have the duty of stealing it to find followers, friends, and subscribers.

This is definitely an exaggeration. People on the internet are generally understanding, and if you don’t want to share the details of your lunch: fine, enjoy it yourself. But that takes self-discipline, which many of us don’t have these days. And so we fine tune the details of the dust on our lunch tables and clear up blemishes on our skin with photoshop all for the sake of a few comments from our closest friends (that would see you that day anyway), and then we move on.

I felt this pressure when I was first starting out on the internet, primarily on instagram. It didn’t feel right to take the contents of others so that I had a coherent aesthetic, so I constantly took pictures. I took pictures of my calendar, I took pictures of my cousins and my brother and my hands and the world. Then, I edited them with my app of choice and posted them.

However, one day, the truth of it actually struck me in the form of light. I was walking to school and when I turned the corner, and I saw a magnificent sunrise. (Before that, I had only seen peeps of beautifully colored clouds above the roofs.) Naturally, I felt the urge to translate this feeling into words, or at least to pixels, but my phone was at home and my paper was in my backpack, so I didn’t. I continued to walk and admire the sunset, and when I got to school I wrote about it. As I was writing, and this happens frequently, my brain shifted. I thought about my lack of materials, my lack of energy to get them, and I wrote about that instead.

To this day, that sunrise stays in my heart as one of the most beautiful in my short life, because I realized that I didn’t need to share those moments. I could collect them in this brain of mine and relish them without accessing anything.

There’s a certain comfort in not giving too much of yourself away, of keeping little pieces of your personality tucked away so that only the people that bother to look for it will find it.

(I apologize for the cliché post, but I just had to write something about this.)