The addiction question is often one that people silently ask themselves. Shouldn’t we be spending less time checking and rechecking our many screens, large and small, and more time taking part in what used to be regarded as real life? Is there something inherently wrong when people being separated from their phones, computers and tablets makes them feel nervous, irritable, tense — in other words, when they begin to exhibit classic withdrawal symptoms?For guidance on this, I got in touch with Sieberg, who has given as much thought to the subject as anyone of whom I’m aware. A former CNN correspondent, he is a lecturer, writer and broadcaster on technology issues who, in his own life, became increasingly conscious of the unhealthy hold that digital devices can have. He wrote a book called “The Digital Diet” that argues persuasively that there can come a time in a person’s life when he or she is a good candidate for technology detox.
Sieberg is hardly a guy stuck in some dust-covered, pre-technology past: He has always been among the first to own each new portable device, and he likes the many good things the digital experience can provide. But he realized — when his wife would wake up in the middle of the night to see him, in bed, illuminated by the glow of one screen or another that he had decided to check one more time before he fell back asleep — that something might need remedying.
There is, he said, a feeling common among people who are digitally hooked that, when it’s just them and the real world and no screen, they are somehow cast adrift, cut off: “It’s a sense of, ‘What am I missing?'” But in truth, a strong case can be made that when a person lives too many hours a day in the digital universe, that is when he or she is really missing something — missing the things that are taking place in the flesh-and-blood world.