Tag: Text messaging

Face the facts: we are all headed for an "iDisorder"

91562-87831[1]Who, me?

It should come as no surprise that we are all hopelessly addicted to our devices, particularly our smartphones. Why shouldn’t we be? We are now able to carry a powerful computer around 24/7 in our pocket or purse. The new “WWW” really means “Whatever, Wherever, Whenever.” And we are all succumbing to its draw. Just look at any restaurant table and you will see phones sitting next to forks and knives. It is normal to see someone pick up a smartphone, tap tap tap and put it back down while in the middle of talking. Is this healthy or are we all headed down a slippery slope toward what I call an “iDisorder.”

An iDisorder is where you exhibit signs and symptoms of a psychiatric disorder such as OCD, narcissism, addiction or even ADHD, which are manifested through your use—or overuse—of technology. Whether our use of technology makes us exhibit these signs or simply exacerbates our natural tendencies is an open question, but the fact is we are all acting as though we are potentially diagnosable.

Several recent studies from my lab highlight some of these issues. In one anonymous online survey of more than 1,000 Americans we found that more than half of teenagers and young adults of the iGeneration (born in the 1990s) and the Net Generation (born in the 1980s) told us that they became anxious if they couldn’t check their text messages all day long. And text they do! According to the Nielsen Company the “typical” teen sends and receives 3,417 text messages per month. Teen girls top that with nearly 4,000 per month! If the teens sleep 8 hours a night (which is an hour less than recommended) that’s between 7 and 8 text messages per waking hour.

Source: Face the Facts: We Are All Headed for an “iDisorder” | Psychology Today

Go to the source if you’d like the rest of Dr. Larry Rosen’s perspective…

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Focusing Away From Distractions

Your newsfeed on Facebook. That email you forgot to write. The text message from your ex. The model’s body on the cover of a magazine that you wish you had. The mountain of work stuff that won’t let you visit your parents this weekend. The shiny object over there! All of the aforementioned have something in common and they all serve the same purpose. They’re all distractions and you allow them to keep your focus away from what’s happening right in front of your eyes.

Everyday we allow excuses, complaints and stories to close the portal to the depth of intimacy in our lives. Intimacy, or lack thereof, can show up in every kind of relationship. Why do we use our decoys to keep it out of our space? Because we’re so terrified of being let down, abandoned, forgotten, overseen, discouraged or denied? Yes, we block intimacy on purpose and we’ve conditioned ourselves to do so for as long as we can remember.  If you think you’re being strategic about selecting the kind of intimacy that you let in, get ready for a wake up call. If your wall is up, nothing can get through. The walls we build aren’t made out of Swiss cheese.

The other night I was out to dinner with four of my closest girlfriends. I noticed some things that night that inspired my blog today:

We all had our cell phones on the table instead of in our purses. In the middle of our catching up, one of my friends got a text message. The screen of her smartphone lit up like a beacon in the distance. It caught all of our eyes in the lowly lit setting of the swanky restaurant. She grabbed her phone and became invested in her own little world for a couple minutes while the rest of us continued to chat. The pulling away of her energy from the intimacy of the present moment began a domino effect. Another one of my friends began scrolling through her text conversations… just because.

Another friend started talking about something that her ex boyfriend wrote on his Facebook wall and she couldn’t wait another moment to show it to us. While she waited for her Facebook app on her iPhone to update, my other friend said, “Shoot! I forgot to email my investor!” So she jumped on her phone to send him a quick email. My iPhone sat innocently on the table next to my empty bread plate, but I pushed the button to see if I had missed a text while everyone became invested in their handheld lifelines.

Yep, I missed one from a handsome young man I had lunch with the day before. I began to write back and then looked up at my dinner dates. We were ALL on our phones. “We’re RIDICULOUS! Look at us right now!” I said. We all laughed about it in the moment, but later that night I wondered why that has become even somewhat normal.

We all used shiny objects to take our attention away from being fully connected with each other. To truly be connected and invested with someone can feel risky and uncomfortable. What’s the longest you’ve looked into someone’s eyes? Staring contests end when someone smiles, laughs, looks away or blinks. If this were an easy thing to do, we wouldn’t call it a contest. Looking into the windows of another being’s soul can stir up a lot of stuff on both sides of that looking glass. Since we’re all reflections of each other, connecting with someone on that level also makes us look inside of us. Not only do we block intimacy from others, we also avoid getting truly intimate with ourselves. What you see in the people before you is exactly how you’re showing up to them.

via thedailylove.com
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Texting on a keyboard phone
Image via Wikipedia

That’s fairly extensive, but many firms are, at the very least, monitoring some of employees’ Internet, phone and email use, especially larger companies and those in sensitive or heavily regulated industries. The market for email monitoring software has grown more than 25% each year since 2008 and is projected to reach $1.23 billion in 2013, according to IT market research firm Gartner; more than one in three large U.S. companies employ actual people to read or analyze employee email, according to a 2010 study by email monitoring firm Proofpoint. Plus, a survey by the American Management Association and The ePolicy Institute found that almost half of the small, medium and large companies surveyed monitored phone use, and two out of three monitored web use. Instant-message and text-message monitoring are also increasing, says Stephen Marsh, chief executive of email archiving firm Smarsh.

Not only do employers watch what you’re doing, but many act on what they find. One in five large U.S. companies fired an employee for violating email policies in the past year, the Proofpoint survey found. What was a fireable offense? Most email investigations pertain to issues of employees leaking sensitive, confidential or embarrassing information, or theft – not racy messages sent to a girlfriend from an office email account or the occasional online shopping binge from the corporate desktop.

via smartmoney.com

Follow the link and go to the source. How many of these things are true in your organization?

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