The Duality of Cyberself

Section 1: The Net Era

As touched upon in the cyber collapse article , there are two types of people, those that grew up with the internet and those that did not. Moreover, as smart technology spreads further, and more people join the internet, nascent social pressures will manifest and soon, we will find ourselves in a new era, one that has different customs and expectations. A new time where populations behave differently, and the children are growing under unexampled conditions.

When I was a senior in high school and people were getting into Facebook, I felt hesitant to join. I only joined Facebook in 2009ish, after it had been around for a while. A similar occurrence happened with Instagram, I made an account in 2014, after many others got into it, and I closed it a while afterwards. I have never had a Snapchat account. I do keep a twitter account (@Nibrunyx) but seldom use it. When a person growing up sees that so many people are on social media, they will want to get an account to be “normal” like everybody else, however, this new normal has people constantly checking their phones and mentally occupied, and I believe that the way people use the internet can be detrimental to them psychologically, especially if used without scrutiny.

In Kuwait, a survey conducted by the Kuwait News Agency in 2016 estimated that 72% of Kuwaiti’s use social media for more than five hours a day. I consider this a very scary percentage and duration, and perhaps both are not entirely accurate, but anybody who lives in Kuwait can attest to the reliance the population has on social media. People in Kuwait drive and use Snapchat, they send all sorts of statements through WhatsApp and frequently, the social media response is faster than the news agencies and just as reliable. News and rumors are both propagated through WhatsApp, Snapchat or Instagram. Many people spend significant hours in a day watching other people live their lives on social media and Kuwaiti fashionistas (influencers) make an insane amount of money. Clearly, the internet is becoming a larger player in the dynamics of the country.

These social media platforms all have their own utility and place, in and of themselves, they are not evil, but rather, are tools. Much like a hammer could be used to fix or destroy, social media offers people a world of possibilities and interactions that did not exist before. However, what I want to first highlight is the shift in internet etiquette that has come with the regular usage of smart technology.

Before, when a person wanted to contact another, they might have called them if the hour were appropriate, otherwise they would wait till the following day. Getting a phone call at 10 PM almost always started with an apology in case the other person was busy or preoccupied or sleeping; we were all living our own lives while communicating with each other and people would respect that distance. As Whatsapp and similar chat programs picked up popularity, the nature of our cyber living became instantaneous. We no longer sent messages and awaited our response, but rather, could track each other in real-time. I remember the “last seen” feature causing problems between some of my friends (who at the time, might have been anywhere between 18-22). They would get bugged that a person was online but had not responded to them. This effect is like seeing that a person had received a message (blue check marks) but had not responded. Surely enough, in some cases, this sort of reaction is normal. Some situations might be urgent or time-sensitive; if you are in a line at a store or at an event, and you want to ask a friend whether they want an item or a ticket, you might be inclined to tracking where they are and whether they have responded or not. In such cases, perhaps people would get agitated if the response is not prompt, however, the previous sense of “people might not have access to the internet right now” has diminished as many of us carry the internet in our pockets, and many people expect us to respond because we have that access. It can almost feel as if there is a social obligation to be connected and accessible via the internet even though that sort of choice is supposed to go back to the individual. Indeed, times are changing.

Furthermore, while people used to call each other up and invite each other to events, the younger generations are more likely to make an event on Facebook or make a post and have people reserve if not just share stuff over group chats and expect people to sift through the messages. When a person asks why they were not notified about the event, a typical response of “It was on Facebook!” is provided or “It was written in the group!”.  Surely enough, it’s not wrong to make a Facebook event and have people RSVP or decline at their own discretion, nor is it wrong to do so in a group chat, but what I think might be happening is that people begin to imagine that others use the internet or their smart devices as much as they do, and for many people, this is not the case.

This expectancy to be online further becomes a problem when we consider current middle school or high school students. Currently, it is not a matter of whether it is cool to use the internet or not, it is a matter of how life is lived. When most of the population is living in cyberspace, you either accept living offline and isolated from them (which is difficult for teens of that age, especially when everything is online and fitting in with your peers is very important) or you join them (the more likely option).

For an adult, we might be able to get away from the pressures of keeping up with people online if we vocalize that choice. As an adult, people say “it is up to you, do what you want.” However, when we consider aging teens in the current world, especially those that were born after social media was considered normal, they might never be given that distance by their peers, nor might they even seek it. What one grows up with is what they consider normal, and if being online 24/7 is normal as one ages, then they will not consider that there was a time when things were not this way; when the internet was not everywhere and constantly on, back when the internet would finish (Remember dial-up cards?) or switch off and you had to do other things in your day. Currently, people get online and spend countless hours daily.

With access to the internet being as extensive as it is now, the behavior of mankind is changing. These changes in behavior mirror the changes that were brought about by the printing-press, the radio or the television. The internet, however, encompasses all these things and more. The internet is all types of information. The internet is the news, the internet is new music, the internet is the popular TV shows and new movie releases, it is all the forms of information we seek, and it is even what we consider truth. Furthermore, as people spend more and more time on social media, it is becoming apparent, and research shows, that these services are being tied to our esteem and mental health. Facebook, for example, is cited in over 33% of divorces in the UK and the US alone. The internet is different from previous forms of media (Radio, TV, newspaper) because the internet has become a way of life. Kuwait might be an extreme case, I do not think the entire world spends over five hours on social media daily, but clearly, as one travels or looks around, we see more and more people on their devices and at a younger age than before.

Section 2: Structure, behavior and Usage

When we first started using the internet, the cyberworld was nowhere near as connected or structured as it is now. There was no concept of the cloud, you could not use your Facebook ID to log into 1000+ websites and the search engines were primitive, furthermore, the content, while extensive at the time, was nowhere near as large as now.

In the past, you would have to look for websites using whatever means you found (asking people, trying out random domains, watching ads etc). Currently, the web is organized through social media platforms that allow people to share links and pages. Furthermore, search engines are structured, refined and intelligent; the internet is so documented now by comparison that even search queries can be predicted. This makes the social media format a powerful influencer on how people interact with the web and life. Many of the prominent websites and applications that currently exist, fall under some category of social media. YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat are a few, but also video games have become more social mediaesque as developers make the online component of gaming larger and sharing gameplay easier. Many websites have places for people to comment and buttons to share the page on different social media platforms. Next to news anchors are their twitter handles. The internet has matured over the past ten years and it is only getting bigger.

When a person begins using the current internet at an age of five or eight, they will likely end up in some form of social media. I view social media as a convergent format that the internet is moving towards. An ever-increasing number of websites are adopting similar designs and ideas from each other. Eventually, the kids enter a world where their actions are rated by the other people around them in the form of likes, shares, retweets, karma, etc. These fake internet points (FIP) hold tremendous value to people psychologically and are part of what keeps people constantly checking their phone and interacting with social media.

Many websites and services have their own statistics that people use to quantify the impact of a given post or event. YouTube for example, has views, likes and dislikes. This layer of quantification and sorting is also preceded by the social networks view or direction. For example, because 9GAG, an image aggregate social media website, has a dominantly Asian user base, the criteria for a popular post is tailored to that demographic. They are the ones choosing what makes it to the top of the website. Similarly, Imgur, a similar website, has a dominantly American userbase and the criteria for a popular post is tailored and reflective of that demographic.

A child growing up using either website will be more likely to think like the members in that social network. These meme’s that get circulated act much like jokes did before we had the internet, we would get them from one source or another and they would get passed around. However, as people see high rated posts on one website, that type of humor begins to overwrite their own as they are likely to use the website frequently, changing slowly over time. Furthermore, the humor changes because if other people find it funny, we can laugh together, and all become part of a larger whole. Much like stand up is funnier when other people are laughing (try watching a stand-up skit by yourself and see how hard you laugh vs when there are others around laughing with you), a teen might begin to find certain memes funny if they knew there were other people laughing at the same memes. This transformation can occur with time and I believe that it’s reversible; if you stop using the website, your brain will break out of that “zone” and you might no longer find it funny, interesting or entertaining.

Interestingly, and this might attest to the extent that some care about FIP, there is a tremendous amount of reposting that gets done in the hopes of striking FIP gold. In some cases, a user will repost the same image multiple times, perhaps with a different title, trying to strike a higher number of likes or shares, there are also cases where a user will delete a post if it does not get the recognition they think it deserves, and they will repost it later, hoping for better stats.

I view this attempt very natural, human beings want to achieve maximum impact from their actions when possible, they want social acceptance in whatever form it takes. However, what becomes misleading to the growing generation is that many of these FIP do not matter. Youtubers might care about the views and likes because it can bring them money, fashionistas, corporations and professionals might also care about what likes they are getting on the internet, depending on where they work and the nature of their profession, it is also possible that after getting enough likes a person looking for talent finally catches you, however, many kids, teens or college students will end up seeking these FIP for the sake of acquiring them for a portion of time and then leaving them when they move on in their lives. This becomes like chasing fool’s gold; it might shine now and bring you happiness, but ultimately, it has no real value because we only care about them so long as we care about the social media format.

If one considers that one day they will move on from their social media account to other things in life, then you recognize that the value of the likes on your account will become irrelevant and the time spent obtaining them, wasted. If you consider the likes you have achieved on your photos and posts as valuable, then you will never move on from social media. Some people care about their video game characters more than they do themselves, and it is very possible that some care about their social media accounts more than themselves. When people focus on something intensely, they could be using that thing as an escape from problems going on in their lives, or internal issues. When it comes to growing teens, this distraction is more likely as school, social pressure and the increasing demands of academia cause stress. It is important for the newer generation to recognize that many of these FIP will not matter throughout their entire lives, but only so long as they care about that flavour of social media. What high scores we achieve in video games only matter if we care about that video game, the score of our posts only matter if we care about that given social media format.

Again, I am not trying to undermine the importance of sharing things online. Many great movements and issues were raised through social media platforms, however, if a person has nothing going on and they are spending a lot of their time on social media, I believe it important to consider doing something else; the social media will not matter forever and once they move on from it, they will still have nothing going on.

Additionally, as people adopt the internet at younger ages, I believe their perception of self, will differ. The internet creates a bubble around us in which we are surrounded by the things that make us who we currently are; based on your Infotrition , you are likely to subscribe to various channels and follow certain types of accounts. Furthermore, based on what you already like and follow, more of the same stuff is suggested to you by the different algorithms that track your likes, page visits and what you share with friends. In this way, people are likely to maintain the same mental perspective for a longer period and have a lower tolerance towards unfamiliar information. If a post brings up a sense of confusion, people are more likely to swipe it away than they are to dwell on it and think about what the post is trying to convey. Most people surround themselves with what is familiar. On social media, people tend to follow accounts that they understand, however, this “sticking to what is familiar” feeds back into the same problem of a static mental perspective.

When media was spread by radio, television or newspaper, I think people had more interest in interacting with programs or articles that they were not entirely familiar with; you might switch the TV on and watch a movie you never had interest in or listen to a radio program on an obscure topic. This interaction with the novel might be due to a lack of selection, however the product is still mental expansion. The way television or radio programs were made, allowed for people to get exposed to new ideas and creations. The internet, while still a viable method to find novel information, often ends up being used to find more of what we are familiar with, as that is the type of content we are likely to look for. It is difficult to look for something you have no idea about, and if you are vaguely interested in a subject, it can be difficult to know where to start within the endless stream of info. Additionally, finding truly “novel” information is less likely to happen as the information feed is generated by users for the users. The curators that used to select or make thought-provoking programs have been lost to the algorithms that select what people are currently interested in, talking about or your view history. If one accepts that “many people prefer simpler content over complex content”, then the people will like the simpler content and those videos will be the ones that get viewed. This will lower the sophistication of the content that gets circulated over time unless there is some sort of cyber renaissance. With lower sophistication, I’d imagine that people are less likely to engage in provoking material and thus, remain stagnant.

Furthermore, as the internet provides more information for people in an easier and faster manner, memory, and by extension, critical thinking, declines.

The faster we retrieve information, the less likely we are to remember it; this is because the speed and depth  understanding are opposing forces. To think about how things are related to each other, one must first remember the definition of, and details about, the individual components. Once a person remembers multiple pieces of information, they can begin to comprehend how these two or more facts, concepts or properties are related or act upon each other; how could you hope to think about global warming if you cannot remember (or do not know) details about earth’s atmosphere, its composition, chemistry, physical science and meteorology? Could you understand what’s happening in a political situation if you do not remember (or do not know) the history of that region? While it is possible to retrieve all the information needed to form an opinion or generate a view on something, having that information in your mind is what allows your brain to juggle the facts around and produce new perspectives or define your own. If you need to go through the internet and retrieve details about several components pertaining to the different ideas you are thinking about, you are much less likely to extrapolate on them and form original thoughts as your brain will not be able to retrieve the information, analyse all of it, and form a true opinion. The current speed of the internet does not help build memory either, people surf the web at an ever-increasing pace. Furthermore, as things are explained simply, we spend less time sinking our teeth into what we are digesting from our feed. Since we do not remember things exactly or in-depth, it becomes difficult to think of things critically, diminishing our capability to synthesize new views or challenge old ones. Furthermore, with the current speed of the internet, we frequently look up information without necessarily thinking about what we are asking first.

People google things before their brain turns a cog at a guess. Because it is so easy to look up answers to the questions we have, our brain does not get to practice forming its own hypothesis or guess. In certain fields like science or when looking up a technical piece of information, perhaps it is unrealistic to “think of an answer” if one has absolutely no idea what it could be (if you do not know what a Bitcoin is, you cannot deduce it from its name), but in many instances, one should at least attempt to guess why something is a certain way before looking up the answer if possible. This simple practice will help their brain think critically and organize the information in their head if they care to organize it at all.

Let us suppose a person wanted to google “What is a solar eclipse?”

If you think about the sun turning black, and you know that the planets rotate, one could guess that maybe, something is coming between us and the sun and blocking the solar rays (if the sun were not blocked, we would receive its light and it would not become black). Had you thought it were a planet that comes between us and the sun (it is the moon that causes a solar eclipse), at least your brain is trying to solve the problem. You might end up reading about the phenomenon and learning that a planet would not cover the sun that way as the nearest planet is too far away or that the rotation of the planets do not occur that way; but when we merely look up information to get the answer, our brain jumps to the answer and we do not think about how we could have arrived to that conclusion had we tried to reason our way to it. This is much like looking at the solution to a math or physics problem without seeing how the person worked their way to that answer; you will not remember the equation being used, you will not understand the relationship between the variables and the units, you will merely know that the answer is 12 and your brain will move on; leaving little to no impact on memory, reasoning or critical thinking in the long run.

The internet also gives us access to knowledge, allowing us to learn virtually any skill or answer any question we desire. From the Do-it-yourself culture to online schooling and expanding services; truly, the internet is the closest one can get to infinite possibilities. As a parent, many of the questions that arise with your little ones are answered by the internet, and these answers were not available to the people who existed prior to the spread of smart technology.

On the other side, our forefathers were required to go through a more rigorous path to find the answers they sought. I believe older parents that had access to fewer resources were forced into understanding their children better that current ones do. Depending on how their children were reacting and what preparation they had done before hand, they would figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. As people can google all sorts of things now, many people rely on googling the current problem they have and working on it then, instead of learning about the whole process in one go and operating autonomously. Life expectancy is much higher now than it was before, and perhaps older methods have become outdated, but what I want to bring to focus is that before, you would learn about many interrelated things in one go, as that is how information was organized. If you were interested in finding the answer to a question, you would have to venture to some library, seek a professional or do your own research, looking for books on the topic and doing a whole lot of looking and learning and reading to find the answer you seek. While this process takes much longer, the result is that you know much more than what you were looking for. In today’s world, people look up stuff all the time and learn precisely the fact they seek, however, if they are unfamiliar with other aspects of the same topic, then that single fact seldom provides them with a real, coherent understanding of the larger picture.

If you used the internet to learn why lightning strikes, you will learn that a lightening strike occurs due to differences in electric charge. For many people who look up information, they will stop there and begin thinking about the next thing. They might still not understand how clouds form, how clouds accumulate charge, or how this is affected by other weather conditions etc. In the past, a person who is interested in learning why lightning strikes would end up learning about many facets of the topic as that is how information was learned, in bulk.

Currently, we look up specific pieces of information on the internet in isolation, and we tie all the little facts together to form an understanding of the world and its phenomena; before, people would learn dominantly from books, professors, experimentation or experience and therefore, would learn about a specific topic in context, building upon that knowledge to form their understanding of the world.

On top of that, our attention span also suffers as the expected length of media changes. There was a time when people would watch a five or eight-minute video without considering it too long; now, most people will double-check the length (or remaining time) of a video after a couple of minutes go by if not less, as that is the length of time Instagram provides for its users; Snapchat less. The faster the medium, the more adjusted to that length people become. Even reading an article that’s a couple of paragraphs long can deter many people from finishing the article.

Furthermore, the internet allows us to remain up to date with virtually any topic that interests us. This interest can be direct (I want to know what person X is saying/doing) or indirect (I want to know what is happening in general or in a region). Direct updates can be sought by following people on twitter, Snapchat or other social media platforms, indirect updates can be found by looking at trending topics in a given region or receiving push notifications from specific news outlets. In Kuwait, I’ve heard doctors say that they will receive videos passed around on Whatsapp or a similar service of a car accident before the victim reaches the hospital, allowing them to prepare for the arrival of the casualty beforehand. Furthermore, this up-to-dateness can have people track political, scientific or regional changes and receive updates to the news at the fastest pace possible. Being up to date also means that we can quickly find reviews about products we might be interested in, or entertainment we are considering digesting. Before, people would buy and sell things as they saw fit; you might get a nice price on something expensive or you might be getting ripped off without knowing, now we can make comparisons, and by extension, make better choices in our purchases.

However, this reliance on “the internet’s opinion on things” also creates a form of pressure unto the world. There have been cases of fake reviews for video games coming up when companies want a certain game to sell, there will be cases where movies will be rated in a similar fashion to drive sales further. Furthermore, if the internet likes or dislikes something, that can push people who have no opinion to take up the internet’s stance on the issue.

Nickelback, a rock band, receives a lot of hate from people and the internet, and more people will claim that they hate them even if they do not have an opinion, because that is the internet’s stance on Nickelback. I think that this adoption of another’s opinion is what is happening, as many people who I have heard bash on the band, do not feel passionately about music or other musical artists; I reckon, if one really hates a band they think is terrible, they would be vocal about how much they hate other bands they think are terrible as well. Similarly, youtubers or social media celebrities can do something wrong and suddenly, people despise them, even if many of those people who claim disliking them or those who are outraged do not know the context of the events or the history of the person in discussion.

Lastly, as we spend time seeing what other people are up to on social media, we tend to see them at their best, as those are the types of photos people post. Constantly seeing others in this exaggerated state can put us under the illusion that our lives do not have as much excitement or events happening. Frequently, people will post their best artwork, their favorite photo or photographs from special events like travels and weddings. Much like beauty magazines can make people feel ugly, social media will make people feel boring. This can make people feel unmotivated as they think “I’ll never be able to draw like that” or “I’ll never be that pretty”.

By allowing everyone access online to the same platforms on social media and other services, we can all get our voices out to the world, allowing for an unprecedented outreach that did not exist in earlier forms of media or history. Simultaneously though, it is important to understand how websites are organized and what drives them. Instagram used to be organized in a chronologic fashion, meaning you would get to your friends posts as your friends posted them; however, Instagram, in its current format, relies on FIP to organize the feeds, necessitating people to get more FIP from their posts if they want to be seen. Social media site Digg also had a policy change in which people (or companies, etc) could pay money to have their post be at the top of the homepage. Furthermore, one can imagine something like this happening with Google or Bing. Therefore, while the internet could theoretically provide everybody with an outlet to share their views and opinions, you can control the feed such that some views and opinions are more likely to be seen or recommended than others, more so likely with the elimination of net neutrality. If you are going to spend a significant amount of time on the internet, you would do yourself well to learn about the backend much like a person driving a car should understand its mechanics.

The Internet’s structure will change with time, and already it has had many influences on our behavior and manners in 2018. Some changes that I’ve touched upon include how conversation has changed  as well as how reliance on technology can affect us. There are plenty of other changes that have occurred, and with emerging technologies like 5G internet, the speed will become so fast that cyberspace will become instant. There will be no buffer, no loading, just instant access to whatever you are looking for or thinking about at your finger tips; and perhaps this is where the duality of cyberself presents itself more clearly.

Section 3: The Duality of Cyberself

Prior to the spread of smart technology, people devoted more of their time to physical activity and mental creativity. Depending on your age, this either meant focusing on work, play, or whatever had to get done at the time. Additionally, because information couldn’t be stored on the internet or computers, people retained more information. Furthermore, because the cyberworld was not an option for having fun, many people had to pick up one hobby or another to fill up their free time. When we ask how our parents spent their time as kids, many parents will answer either working, playing sports, reading books, painting, exploring, sports etc. Currently, due to access to the net, many of us, whether old or young, can spend a lot of time without really doing anything. Additionally, because we have our computers and the internet, we do not retain as much information as people did previously. Indeed, even the process of typing one’s thoughts does not consolidate memory like writing. As time goes on, larger numbers of people are forgoing physical activity and mental creativity in favor of cyber surfing.

Being online is comfortable for us. We get a lot of feedback instantaneously and with minimal effort. This is further reinforced by FIP associated with the different things we do online. However, with so much time spent online, it is important to find balance between time spent in the cyberworld and time spent in the physical world. Additionally, as we gain these benefits from using the internet, we must also work at being content with physical existence. We lived in our physical bodies before we lived online, and our mind and skeleton are more a part of us than our data plan, although we can lose sight of this concept in today’s world.

The internet is constantly changing and subtly entering people’s lives in more ways than before. There was a time when using the internet was for fun purposes only but then it evolved to include doing work. There was a time when you could not order food through the internet but now you can. Video games and gaming apps on cell phones used to be niche markets and are now one of the first categories in the app store. As time moves on, the internet will expand to help us do all that we could ever think about doing. Therefore, I think it crucial to gauge ourselves and study our own behavior and relationship with the internet. When we care too much about being online and existing in cyberspace, we end up moving away from the physical aspects of existence. Personally, if I’m playing video games, my body does not get hungry. There had been times where I spent 5-6 hours playing a game and forgot to have lunch as a result. Forgetting lunch might be a thing that has only happened to me, but commonly, emotional awareness and health get neglected in favor of using the internet, and both of those are components of physical existence that play crucial roles in people’s lives as they mature.

Many people go online when they are feeling a certain way. Our personal bubbles do very well to keep us in a good mood as we follow the things we want to see. When trouble rises, or tension builds up, I find that many people will get an urge to go to their peaceful space online instead of confronting the problem in front of them or reflecting upon how they are feeling from a given interaction. This sort of thing can become an even larger problem if the person gets used to having this escape at a young age. I believe this venture from the physical can be harmful as being aware of your emotions (coping with tension/pressure, reflecting upon how you reacted or why you did something) is precisely what makes you understand your feelings, learn from your mistakes and control your wilfulness. Confronting your behavior and inner thoughts is what will bring forth the adjustments you wish to pursue and if people rely upon their cyber bubble to protect them from those inner thoughts and feelings, they become like children covering their ears screaming “Nanananananana”; to preserve their mental state and current habits, they expel the outer forces that are working at change, even if those changes are ones they desire. This stagnation can also last indefinitely as the cyber bubble is unlikely to go away, merely taking shape within the various things we can do online. Whether it’s a video game, TV show or social media, the internet provides us with an escape from physical life.

Aside from this cyber bubble, it is much easier to be online while stationary as opposed to on the go. Frequently, people walk at a slow pace to respond to a message or read an E-mail. If you try to walk up or down a set of stairs while using your phone, you are more likely to slip. As a result, we spend significant amounts of time sitting down and being online. This can have negative effects on our posture as well as our willingness to move. While growing up, I used to hunch forward. Usually, hunching is the reason people tell you to fix your posture (Ever heard someone say, “You’ll have a hunchback if you keep it up!”?) After I had an incident where I moved a bunch of books and hurt my lower back, I began working at improving my posture via proprioception. Now that I’m in better physical condition, I have concluded that proper posture does not only have benefits physically, by removing unwanted stress on joints, but also mentally. When you fix your posture, you begin to think more clearly as your mind feels better integrated with your body. Prior to understanding how all my different muscles connected to each other, my brain felt disconnected from the rest of my body, acting by itself. When you are sitting up straight, chin up, shoulders retracted and back straight, you feel stronger and in a better mood and many articles can be found tying proper posture to improved mood. As many people use their phones in a harmful position (you want to raise your phone to your eyes, not bend your neck down at your phone as bending your neck puts a heavy load on your spine, look up iHunch or iPosture) one can imagine that with time, people will have worse posture. This worse posture will create neck, back, shoulder or wrist pain for many people who will not realize it is due to their usage of smartphones and computers. You can always fix your posture as you spend time online but when people are connected 24/7 to the internet, it can become difficult to ensure you are always sitting down ergonomically. Additionally, the human body is designed to be active and as we spend more time sitting down or hunching and being on our devices, even standing, seems like a more tedious task than it should be, let alone walking. A healthy human being should be able to stand comfortably for two to four hours a day. Significantly more than many people stand in their desk job-to-couch lifestyle. Furthermore, as many people consume sugary snacks while browsing the web or at their desk job, the impact on health hits harder. The energy requirement to move is significantly less than the energy required to exercise; if moving is strenuous, exercise will be hopeless.

Posture and willingness to move are only a few examples of physical aspects affected by cyber living. While you can work to make sure you maintain both as you surf the web, I am merely using them as examples of things that get neglected by many people in favor of being online. Humans only had the physical world before they had the cyberworld as an option and as more people neglect their physical bodies to be online, the dichotomy begins to form. The duality of cyberself lies partially in the fact that requiring access to the internet can stop people from being self-sufficient in the physical world.

Self-sufficiency is a very important trait to develop if one aims to attain a deeper happiness, a feeling of self-worth and maturity; to be self-sufficient means that you hold the key to your vigor, you do not require any aid or support from external things to feel secure, motivated or fulfilled because you can thrive on your own. I see this definition extending to the use of the internet. I think that a healthy, self-sufficient human being, should be able to stay offline without the lack of web causing huge problems to their psyche, motivation or mood. Clearly, most of us need to use the internet for our jobs or for our friends, but when the requirement is psychological, it becomes an issue. If your baseline, your idle state, is to be online and connected, then you might never accept being alone with your mind and facing your inner thoughts and feelings.

Due to the unlimited stimulation we can receive from being online and surfing the web, we can use the internet to mask boredom. However, I think that boredom is the manifestation of a deeper problem within the individual, and in some ways, is the opposite of self-sufficiency, but I will delve deeper into this in another post. I believe that being online constantly (or significantly every day) means that you are never fully present with your physical body. As such, when people are afflicted with boredom, they end up working on curing their symptoms (via entertainment on the web) without taking care of the cause of boredom or thinking about why they are bored in the first place. They spend hours delving online for something that will save them from the dullness only to find that feeling resurfaces constantly. Furthermore, if this fleeing to the internet persists for a long time, there can come a period when the person loses the capacity to confront themselves and their inner nature, losing interest in what’s going on in their brain in favor of what is happening on the internet.

If one’s comfort requires internet access, then their body requires two existences to be content, one physical, one cyber. With time, your mind can lean towards cyber existence over physical existence (Surfing the web, watching stuff online, doing stuff online instead of having a hobby, reasoning, imagining, socializing etc). Afterwards the mind does not get a chance to crystallize its thoughts, perspective and reflections as it spends time digesting stuff online in a state of quasihibernation. An internet addict’s mind is estranged in its own shell, it requires something outside of itself to be content with thinking.

If we begin to care more about what we are doing online, how we fare digitally, how many points we have in our video games and what our celebrities are doing in their time while neglecting our health, life plan, inner thoughts, emotions and what’s going on in our locale… then what are we becoming?

When internet access is required to feel secure, comfortable or wonderful, the meaning of being alive changes. “I think, therefore I am” VS “I connect, therefore I am”. With time, people who prefer cyber existence will lose their connection to their physical selves; constantly focusing on the lives they portray in cyberspace, and seeing how other people portray their lives online, instead of analyzing  the world around them and working to understand the possibilities within them. This departure from the physical will become even more apparent when internet speeds eliminate loading and buffering, allowing our newly formed habits to instantaneously bring up videos, websites and scroll images before our mind has time to ponder the effects of these habits or entertaining the thought of doing something else.

Consider how much time you spend in front of a screen and the role the internet has in satisfaction with your life. If you can, try to reduce the amount of time you spend online and see how your body reacts to the change, do you feel more agitated if you do not spend as much time online? Are you bored without your phone? Do you speak differently if you are holding your phone in a conversation? Do your thoughts change when you put the phone down? Where does your mind go when it finds itself idle? The inner crevices of your cerebrum or the endless clouds of the net?