My Digital Addiction

The Key to Happiness is Nam Myoho Renge Kyo - The Lotus Sutra or the abilities to see your life in its fullest potential.

2011-03-09T07:33:00.001-08:00

Is Lady Gaga is a Racist? - Born this way is Racist. Chola, Orient etc

2011-02-16T05:16:00.000-08:00

Is the lady really Racist for choosing those lyrics?

I tend to stay out of these sorts of conversations but I feel like saying something....

Is the Lady really a racist?

What a load of utter BULLSHIT!

So I am sure you have heard this commentary on Lady Gaga's new song Born this way, being racist.

Well frankly, I find the whole notion ludicrous.

Have they actually listened to the rest of the song. Do they know what kind of message she consistently puts out to the world and her fans.

Check out this article about V magazine she did, where she was bronzed up.

http://americanpowerblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/hey-aint-that-racist-lady-gaga-does-al.html

This is what I mean about hysteria in the media.

SUDDENLY Lady Gaga was called Racist and crossing the lines of decency.

I am sorry if you feel that she has been racist in her song, but I think people take this shit far too seriously.

It is a life affirming POP song, that happens to use words that have a bit of history, according to some people.

But people always see negativity, if that is what they are looking for.

On to the words in question;

Chola is actually a word for Tamil People a dynasty.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&q=define%3AChola&btnG=Search&meta=

Orient, is still a word that describes a place in Asia. As in the lyric "Orient made... a person from the Orient

For example;

"I took a trip to The Orient. and had a wonderful time."

But Oriental is NOT a NON-PC word, in the UK as it is in the US.

Just like coloured... if you call someone coloured in South Africa, it is perfectly acceptable, but it is not acceptable in the UK.

So, personally I think everyone should just lighten up and get over it.

Her message is one of being free and living up to your full potential as a human being.

Compare her lyrics and message to Britney Spears, singing about IF YOU SEEK AMY. I say no more.

What a pile of tosh....

You can't tell me that just because she used Orient, in a song, millions of people are outraged.

That is media hysteria and a load of bullshit. If someone called me Honkey, I wouldn't care. They can call me what ever they like. I know who I am.

In my opinion, if you don't like her music, then don't fucking listen to it.

Fame is so fickle. one minute you have adoring fans, then next minute people cant wait to pull you off your pedestal.

Frankly I am quite surprised at some of my friends, who are hard core fans... who have suddenly turned on her.

But then I know everyone loves a good RANT, as much as the rest of us.

But I think there is more to this then a simple... oh she used a racist word, lets all just attack her..

I don't think its fair at all what people are saying.

God makes no mistakes.
I am beautiful this way.
I am on the right track baby I was born this way.
Love your self and you are set.

Tell me why this is such a terrible message.

Lady Gaga Racist Born this way
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When will it end?

2010-12-16T17:56:00.000-08:00

Here we are with a huge budget deficit, 1000s of jobs gone, 20% VAT, public services cut, student riots due to tripling of their fees.

Millions of people are going suffer. The country's economy is a mess thanks 2 a select few.

As they all sit in their ivory towers untouchable, everyone else has to row the boat faster. Someone explain to me why this has happened? again!

At what point in the history of this country wil the people stop being raped by the government?

When will it end?

My Facebook addiction is a bad joke.

2010-10-18T02:19:00.000-07:00

Good morning World.

Well today, is a day where I have decided to try something a little different. Facebook has become far too much of a time waster for me, that I have acctually had to get a friend to lock me out.

She has even gone as so far as to setup a seperate email address, just so that I dont cave in and change my password my self.

As useful as facebook is, I have found my self spending large quantities of time and procrastinating on it daily.

When I have large amounts of work to do, or I am sitting at the station waiting for the train. Instead of reading a book, or when in the studio getting my work done, I sit for hours messing about and reading hte mini feed, staring blankly out in to the nothing-ness of other peoples holographic lives, through the lure of the facebook mini feed.

Where are you with your facebook addiction? Do you think you could live for a month with out it?

Well 3 years ago, we were all just find with out it, what has happened to the world that 500 000 000 people feel the need to be "connected" in such a way. What ever happened to letters and email.

I think I am going to set my self a task to send my friends emails or real letters! gosh! can you imagine my friends faces when they receive a real letter!

wow!

Happy Days!

You can have it all.

2010-10-15T02:25:00.001-07:00

A poem from my beautiful man to me. ( I am indeed a lucky man...)

2010-10-13T10:54:00.000-07:00

For half his life he's lived without,
The stong and nurturing hands,
Of guidance from a parent,
Alone in a smokey land.

Yet somehow he's grown up to be
More than most can aspire
So morally enabled,
With a heart that burns like fire

A light to show my problems
A light blind my fears
A light to make everything better
A strong man to wipe my tears!

I love you.

Why is email addictive? Help I'm addicted

2010-09-27T07:29:00.000-07:00

Email is addictive..

Like lots of people who sit in front of a computer all day, I am addicted to email. This worries me for two reasons. The first is the sheer strength of my compulsion. I must hit the ‘get mail’ button at least a hundred times a day. Sometimes, if I don’t have any new mail, I hit it again immediately, just to check. I interrupt my work to check my mail even when I know that I’m not going to find anything interesting and that I should just concentrate on what I am suppossed to be doing. When I come back to my office it’s the first thing I do. If I’m prevented from checking my mail for more than a few hours I get a little jumpy and remain that way until I have.

This is all rather sad, but the second reason I am worried by my email addiction is that I work in a psychology department and we’re supposed to understand how these things work. Now email isn’t a drug – it doesn’t deliver a chemical into your bloodstream. Yet it is clearly addictive. I’m a normal rational person (which is to say I’m just normally maladjusted) and I know that I don’t need to check my email as often as it do – certainly not immediately after checking it the first time for Goodness’ sake! – but still I am compelled. What’s going on, and can psychological science help me out?

Why is email addictive?

So, I think I’ve got an idea of what’s going on with email, and if I’m right it should provide some clues as to how I can stop myself being so addicted. The key is what psychologists call ‘operant conditioning’. This means the mechanisms by which behaviour is shaped by its consequences; how what we do depends on the rewards and punishments of what we did last time. This topic is the heart of behaviourism, that school of thought which dominated psychology for most of the last century. Many lab animals, and many person-hours, were recruited to help understand exactly how rewards and punishments could be arranged to influence behaviour. One suprising finding is that if you want to train an animal to do something, consistently rewarding that behaviour isn’t the best way. The most effective training regime is one where you give the animal a reward only sometimes, and then only at random intervals. Animals trained like this, with what’s called a ‘variable interval reinforcement schedule’, work harder for their rewards, and take longer to give up once all rewards for the behaviour is removed. There’s a logic to this. Although we might know that we’ve stopped rewarding the animal, it has got used to performing the behaviour and not getting the reward. Because ‘next time’ might always be the occasion that produces the reward, there’s never definite evidence that rewards have stopped altogether.
Email is addictive because it is a variable-interval reinforcement schedule

We’re animals – we have animal brains. All animal brains have the circuitry in place for producing operant conditioning. It’s a fundamental psychological process, and just the sort that can create behaviours what operate automatically, or in spite of our consciously telling ourselves we should do otherwise. Like me checking my checking my email. Checking email is a behaviour that has variable interval reinforcement. Sometimes, but not everytime, the behaviour produces a reward. Everyone loves to get an email from a friend, or some good news, or even an amusing web link. Sometimes checking your email will get you one of these rewards. And because you can never tell which time you check will produce the reward, checking all the time is reinforced, even if most of the time checking your email turns out to have been pointless. You still check because you never know when the reward will come.

I have just proved to myself how automatic my email checking behaviour has become. I am writing this in a hotel room which doesn’t have internet access. When sorting through my email (you don’t need a connection to delete email you’ve replied to, or are never going to reply to) I still hit the ‘check mail’ button at the rest points of the read-consider-delete cycle I am performing. My reflective self knows that there is no internet connection, so there is no way in hell I’m going to have new email – but that knowledge doesn’t filter down to the part of me hitting the ‘check email’ button. The habit, engrained in my mind by operant conditioning, is isolated from conscious knowledge, and in part from deliberate control; it can start without me thinking about it or even me wanting it to.
How can we design in solutions?

If operant condition is at the root of the problem, what’s the solution? Over a hundred years of experimental psychology has provided a rigorous characterisation of behavioural conditioning, and of the process by which reinforced behaviours disappear – known as extinction. By looking at each stage of the process by which a behaviour becomes conditioned, we can throw up ideas for addressing the problem of ‘unconditioning’ them.
Weakening the action-reward link

If a behaviour isn’t rewarded then it will gradually disappear. The problem is that we don’t want to remove the reward (email), so we need, instead, to weaken the strength of the link between the action and the reward. A simple delay would do this – imagine a five minute delay between hitting the check email button and getting new email. A delay is doubly-effective because the longer the delay the more likely you are to have email and so the more consistent the reward will be – and hence the less strong its reinforcing effect (I can see this is action when I go away for a week and check my email when I come back. I might have hundreds of emails, but there’s often nothing that seems very interesting. The combined effect just isn’t as rewarding as the anticipation of getting one hundred single emails). In theory, the opposite end of this ‘consistency strategy’ would be to check email constantly. If you check your email every second then the consistency of the reward increases – you consistently get nothing! The action-habit might extinguish because the action is now rewarded so infrequently relative to the number of times it is performed. How to do this practically? Have your inbox constantly visable, so that there is no jump from wondering if you have new mail/seeing a ‘new mail’ alert and knowing that it isn’t that important (although a down side is that if the new email is intrinsically distracting – such as a good joke, hot piece of gossip or invite out – it will now definitely interrupt when it arrives).

Removing the action all together, so that you cannot demand an email check, doesn’t solve the problem – we just move the association from the action of hitting ‘check mail’ to the action of opening your email client to see if there is any mail there. One strategy is to wait 30 seconds from the appearance of the alert before checking to see what kind of mail has arrived – if you can internalise the delay.
Weaking the stimulus-action association

Automatic behaviours such as email are contingent on environmental triggers – they need the right circumstance to become active, since they aren’t invoked by a smart, deliberate consicous process. So one way to decrease email checking behaviour might be to decrease the association between stimuli and the action. Moving or removing the ‘check mail’ button will stop it hijacking your action-stream when it is in your field of view. Similarly, so will stopping email alerts all together, but it leaves you with the problem of wondering what is going on while you’re attention is on another app (are you missing out on some important information?). Changing the consistency of the environmental trigger could work. If the ‘new mail’ appeared slowly, so it didn’t grab your attention, was in a different place each time, or was a different shape/colour/icon then your low-level monitoring systems wouldn’t be able to form an association between its appearence and automatically triggering the ‘check mail’ interrupt habit. When you wanted to check your email you could scan for the icon – it could still be perfectly obvious, but the lack of consistent appearence would prevent it getting wired into a direct channel in your brain.
Social solutions

I don’t think the solution is social – getting people to never email you urgent information wouldn’t work. There would always be invites for coffee that someone didn’t feel like knocking on your door or phoning you to make, but which they’d still like you to know about (and you’d still like to know, so you’ll be checking your email for them). Plus there’ll always be important information which isn’t urgent, but which we’re still going to want to know as soon as it is available (look at news – it rarely has any immediate consequence for our daily lives, but checking it is how many of us start the day).
Shifting the cost-benefit ratio

A classical approach to changing habits is to shift the cost-benefit pay-off. If checking or reading email is made harder to do, mayhbe we can increase the cost of the action and hence make the overall reward of getting email less. More difficult interfaces maybe? Several screens to click through to get the email? Passwords and ‘are you sure’ dialogue boxes? Punishment is the ultimate ingredient that you can add to alter the pay-off matrix. Except for those of us with immense self-disicipline (“if i check email in the next hour, no coffee at lunchtime”) self-imposed punishment isn’t an obvious strategy (and are those with self-discipline likely to have a problem with getting distracted anyway?).

[Although, on reflection, I don't think this question is as rhetorical as it sounds here. The problem is not with your ability to deliberately schedule and implement actions (including actions such as self-punishments), the problem is with automatically evoked actions (i.e. checking email) and then getting distracted by the consequences. These are two types of actions and it is entirely conceivable that they might be differently ammeanable to the deliberate control of our reflective selves]
Rewarding an alternative, incompatible behaviour

A final strategy, and one that is used in animal training to remove problem behaviours, is to reinforce an alternative, incompatible action. If you have a problem with your pet eagle landing on your head the most efficient way to stop it is to reward landing on a mat at your feet, rather than struggle with extinguishing head-landing. What this would mean in the context of email checking I will leave as an exercise to the reader.
Over to you

So, what I’m really interested in is in seeing what people think. If some of what I’ve said makes sense, what other ways are there to use it to make email less addictive? Or maybe I’ve got the solution completely wrong. Or the problem? I’d like to hear either way

Some things I read while writing this follow (thanks to Marc Baizman for the Katie Hafner article in the NYT)
Links:

Andrew Brown on why the internet-addiction will be like alcoholism for this generation of writers

‘Husband training’, New York Times article about using behaviourist principles in your marriage

February 10, 2005 New York Times, You There, at the Computer: Pay Attention by Katie Hafner (designing interfaces that work with our attention, rather than distract)

Flouride in our water... is it really a good idea?

2010-09-05T14:59:00.001-07:00

Thyriod Function & Flouride in UK water. Bad news if you have low thyroid function - hyperthyriodism

2010-08-05T15:36:00.000-07:00

Who knew that the water in the UK is filled with so much fluoride, and that in the 1970s doctors used fluoride to treat an over active thyroid gland.

So if you are like me, and you have an under active thyroid, if you drink a lot of tap water, with fluoride, it could greatly impair your thyroid function, and lead to weight gain, anxiety, stomach problems (IBS), joint pain, fatigue, food intolerance, feeling cold all the time, strange pin pricks in the toes.

Tap water is great, but if the fluoride is effecting my thyroid function, what the hell am I doing drinking it?

source: http://www.fluoridealert.org/health/thyroid/

How to cure your Facebook addiction?

2010-07-25T02:47:00.000-07:00

So it has been a couple of years now since I wrote about my horrendous addiction to social media. And anyone who has read my blog will know that I am directly involved in this kind of work as I am a web designer. However, recently, I have started working from home as I left full time employment.

It has become abundantly clear that I have a bit of a problem again, as I find my self obsessively checking Facebook, or spending hours and hours connected to it.

I have decided to formulate a plan to cure my self of this incessant addition.

Here is my plan:

Step 1: Give a close friend your user-name and password.

Step 2: Get your friend to login and change your password.

Step 3: Get your friend to write the new password on a bit of paper and put it in an envelope.

Step 4: Have your friend change the email address on your account so you are unable to reset the password.

Step 5: Agree a time scale, of when they will unlock your account. 1 month, 2 months etc

And if you really want to be even more sure you cant get the password out of your friend, ask them to get a close friend to change the password to something else.

Good luck, trying to deal with it.

Please comment if you have this problem or you have ideas on how to stop this addiction.

Nichiren Buddhism is not about simply chanting, and nother more.

2010-07-18T04:57:00.000-07:00

Personally I don't think chanting is understanding or insight. People of course are free to practice chanting, but this is not any branch of Buddhism personally that I would associate with and my personal belief is that this is quite literally mind control , and not the original meaning of any aspect of Buddhism. Buddhism is a intellectual study for the development of the mind and spiritual insight, this practice does not fulfill either goal and misrepresents Buddhism.

My response:

Thank you for your honest comment.

I think that if the Buddha was alive today, he would say this... "do not cast judgement on beliefs and practices of others."

Nichiren Buddhism is a practice centred in daily life, there are three tenants for good solid practice.

1. practice/chanting

2. Study

3. Faith

We study the Lotus Sutra and align our lives for the greater good and happiness of others.

Through chanting Nam myoho renge kyo, and using the Gohonzon, we are able to observe our minds and emotions and make better choices and decisions in life.

Chanting is not a magic lantern, and we are quite aware that action is required to make changes in life and the world;

Devotion to the mystic law of cause and effect with the voice, is the meaning of this mantra, but primarily for people who practice Nichiren Buddhism, this is about becoming aware of all your actions, words & thoughts towards other people, your life and the world as a whole.

How do you feel about a Buddhism that forbid women that practised, how do you feel about Buddhism that said that only priests were allowed to practice, this was the case for what Buddhism had become in many parts of the world, and Nichiren Dishonan was a man who quite literally questioned these beliefs, as he felt that they were not true Buddhism.

Shakyamuni Buddah, gave birth this practice for the sole purpose of lifting people out of the three sufferings of life, birth, sickness and death. This practice meets that goal.

There are many paths to wholeness my friend, and you are correct when you say that this is some form of mind control, but I have to correct you and tell you that it is about controlling your OWN mind, not someone else, controlling it for you.

It is about mastering your thoughts, emotions and mind.

The mind is the root of most of our suffering as human beings at master this human mind, which I liken to a wild horse most of the time, is the key to developing strong and unshakable happiness.

My Peace go with you Buddah.

Love and Light

Robbie

If you disagree with the homosexual lifestyle, why not overturn prop8 and make the gays get married, like the rest of us?

2010-06-23T04:11:00.000-07:00

Devin & Glenn - watch more funny videos

Information overload....

2010-04-12T02:42:00.000-07:00

Do you ever feel like sometimes there is just too much to do?

Facebook, Twitter, sms, work email, personal email, phone calls, letters, junk mail, tv, magazines, books, the list is endless.

I wonder if its possible to suffer from information overload?

With all the things in life that need tending; the garden, the washing and ironing, friendships, the gym, spiritual practice, reading magazines, learning new skills, drawing and the ever amounting array of things I would like to achieve, how do I find the time when I am constantly plugged in to all these things?

Today, I am planning on resigning from my job, I have been here 4 months, but I cant take it any more.

The lack of creativity in this company is astounding. Considering our core product is creative media, I really am struggling to understand where this company went wrong.

Bebo recently went under, sinking to the bottom of the internet grave yard like a gunshot social media gangster with blocks on it's feet. Deep down to the bottom of the sea to sleep with the fishes.

This company was young, creative and bursting with ideas, it rose to fame in the last 5 years, but is now destined to be cut off and shut down.

According to figures from ComScore, Bebo's global unique visitors in February 2010 totalled 12.8 million, down 45% on February 2009. Facebook had 462 million visitors, MySpace nearly 110 million, and Twitter 69.5 million.

What went wrong? Being brought by a global corporation tarnished the cooler-than-thou image of an independent start-up that was particularly popular in school playgrounds. Aggressive expansion by Facebook also played a part.

Like most social networking sites, Bebo also benefited from a novelty factor that can disappear as quickly as it emerges. News Corp, the media conglomerate controlled by Rupert Murdoch, bought MySpace for $580m in 2005, only to watch its appeal diminish along with its value as it loaded the site with adverts.

ITV took a gamble on another UK start up, Friends Reunited, paying £120m in the same year, only to sell it at a huge loss last year.

Company insiders criticise AOL for failing to invest in Bebo, and point out that an acquisition by a corporate giant tends to stifle creativity. That may hide a more uncomfortable truth, however, which can make a mockery of the savviest owners. Social networking sites are businesses based on the fickle behaviour of internet users, who are free to move on to the next site when a competitor emerges and are offered few reasons to stick with their existing site. In that sense, Bebo was a fad.

It may not have fallen into the trap of letting naked commercialisation scare its teenage users away, but nor did it evolve in the manner that many of its competitors did.

Facebook is used by adults as well as children. Much of Twitter's power, influence – and likely longevity – derives from the fact it has become a professional tool, rather than an online outlet for gossip posted by its users.

Start-ups rarely fare well when they are taken under the wing of a bureaucratic corporate parent, and Bebo may also have suffered by hitching its wagon to AOL, a business that has itself seen better days.

It is owned by Time Warner, an American media giant that owns CNN, Time magazine and a host of other assets, but the $162bn deal that brought AOL and Time together is now regarded as one of the most disastrous in corporate history.

Buying Bebo was an attempt to build on AOL's status as the world's first internet provider by bolting on a new audience, but internet users are notoriously promiscuous.

For Bebo's young users, the site turned out to be the online equivalent of a teenage crush – intense while it lasted, but it didn't last…

World of warcraft - A child freaks out and behaves like a wild animal becuase his mother cancels his WOW account.

2009-10-15T15:41:00.000-07:00

This video below is an example of what people are becoming. Slaves to technology. This young man, who has obviously been playing World of warcraft so much so that his mother has had to take control and cancel his account.

This game seems young men and woman and children sitting for hours and days on end glued to their machines, with out water and food sometimes.

It is not only extremely unhealthy, but it is stunting the physical and emotional growth of thousands of young people across the world.

Stop your children playing these games and get them outside in to the world to interact with real people.

Watch this clip, I have never seen anything like it.

If you came home one day and watched your entire family be murdered, how would it effect you?

2009-10-08T14:05:00.000-07:00

Can you imagine this? Please watch this film and share it around.

Richard Dawkins speaks to the Bishop of Oxford about religion, homosexuality, micircles and beyond.

2009-09-10T08:16:00.002-07:00

Love with out talking.....

2009-09-09T06:03:00.000-07:00

Sometimes another person in your life can change you. You don't even have to say a single word.

A MESSAGE TO THE RESISTANCE

2009-09-03T13:46:00.003-07:00

We are living in what the Greeks called the right time for a "metamorphosis of the gods," i.e. of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science.

Jamie Oliver - Jamies America - New Book

2009-09-01T09:22:00.000-07:00

I am quite pleased to have been part of work with Jamie on promoting this book.

You can see more about it all here http://www.jamieoliver.com/jamies-america/

Andy and his best friend Mearl the Squirrel

2009-08-19T04:14:00.001-07:00

Andy and his best friend Mearl the Squirrel from Tim Brown on Vimeo.

How to listen to gaydar radio on your ipod or itouch...

2009-07-14T10:54:00.000-07:00

Gaydar radio is a dance music station, which plays mostly electronic music. As far as my digital addictions go, digital music is one of my top ten.

I have been listening to the station for around 8 years, or at least since it began. The station began 2001 and has been getting bigger and better since.

The station broad casts 24 hours a day on SKY TV channel 0158 , online at gaydarradio.com and on DAB digital radio in London and the south east of England.

Reason I wanted to write about gaydar radio was to share how you can listen when you are on the go, where ever you are in the world.

All you need is an ipod touch or a itouch or a iphone, a copy of fStream from the application library and the mp3 url stream from the station to add in to your fstream application.

The application is a massive hit with me as you are able to record entire shows to your ipod and play them back when you are on the go or on the tube/train.

The instructions on how to listen to gaydar radio on your itouch or iphone are as follow;

Install fstream from the applications library
http://mp3.gaydarradio.com/high is the mp3 stream url you will need in fstream
open fstream
click on favorites
click edit in the top right hand corner
click add a new web radio
add the station name, the url from above, dont worry about the rest
click save
then tap it and it should play if your connected to the web

You can also record and play back station content anytime you like! GAYMAZING!!!!

harmonica

2009-05-19T05:13:00.001-07:00

harmonica
Originally uploaded by ianapplegate.co.uk

What I love about the internet is the how we share.

It always brings a smile to my face to see people being people and being happy!

My heart sings for the beautiful connections we have with our families and the people around us.

You are not your emotions

2009-05-05T02:08:00.001-07:00

A fire reflected in a lake cannot burn the water. Neither can emotions disturb the mind when you don’t get involved in them. Don’t identify an emotion as your self. The fear or anger is not you, only and impersonal phenomenon. Mentally pull back from the emotion and turn your awareness around to observe it. When in the grip of negative emotion we tend to believe it will never end. But emotions are no more permanent than thoughts. With continued practice you’ll find that you only have to wait and any emotion, whether pleasant or unpleasant, is bound to change.

summer's bird

2009-04-28T02:32:00.001-07:00

summer's bird
Originally uploaded by kansunkea

Take these broken wings and learn to fly.

i believe in god only i spell it nature - quote by frank lloyd wright | Things I have learned in my life so far

2009-04-28T01:37:00.000-07:00

i believe in god only i spell it nature - quote by frank lloyd wright | Things I have learned in my life so far

Boy Meets Girl

2009-04-27T07:40:00.001-07:00

Boy Meets Girl
Originally uploaded by aqui-ali

Oh what is this life. If full of care, we have no time to stop and stare!

What is this life if full of woe, we have no time to show sorrow!

Hold on to me dear brother, because I will show you how it is done.

Facebook and Bebo risk 'infantilising' the human mind

2009-02-24T01:32:00.000-08:00

Greenfield warns social networking sites are changing children's brains, resulting in selfish and attention deficient young people

Social network sites risk infantilising the mid-21st century mind, leaving it characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity, according to a leading neuroscientist.

The startling warning from Lady Greenfield, professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln college, Oxford, and director of the Royal Institution, has led members of the government to admit their work on internet regulation has not extended to broader issues such as the psychological impact on children.

Greenfield believes ministers have not yet looked at the broad cultural and psychological effect of on-screen friendships via Facebook, Bebo and Twitter.

She told the House of Lords that children's experiences on social networking sites "are devoid of cohesive narrative and long-term significance. As a consequence, the mid-21st century mind might almost be infantilised, characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity.

Arguing that social network sites are putting attention span in jeopardy, she said: "If the young brain is exposed from the outset to a world of fast action and reaction, of instant new screen images flashing up with the press of a key, such rapid interchange might accustom the brain to operate over such timescales. Perhaps when in the real world such responses are not immediately forthcoming, we will see such behaviours and call them attention-deficit disorder.

"It might be helpful to investigate whether the near total submersion of our culture in screen technologies over the last decade might in some way be linked to the threefold increase over this period in prescriptions for methylphenidate, the drug prescribed for [attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder]."

She also warned against "a much more marked preference for the here-and-now, where the immediacy of an experience trumps any regard for the consequences. After all, whenever you play a computer game, you can always just play it again; everything you do is reversible. The emphasis is on the thrill of the moment, the buzz of rescuing the princess in the game. No care is given for the princess herself, for the content or for any long-term significance, because there is none. This type of activity, a disregard for consequence, can be compared with the thrill of compulsive gambling or compulsive eating.

"The sheer compulsion of reliable and almost immediate reward is being linked to similar chemical systems in the brain that may also play a part in drug addiction. So we should not underestimate the 'pleasure' of interacting with a screen when we puzzle over why it seems so appealing to young people."

Greenfield also warned there was a risk of loss of empathy as children read novels less. "Unlike the game to rescue the princess, where the goal is to feel rewarded, the aim of reading a book is, after all, to find out more about the princess herself."

She said she found it strange we are "enthusiastically embracing" the possible erosion of our identity through social networking sites, since those that use such site can lose a sense of where they themselves "finish and the outside world begins".

She claimed that sense of identity can be eroded by "fast-paced, instant screen reactions, perhaps the next generation will define themselves by the responses of others".

Social networking sites can provide a "constant reassurance – that you are listened to, recognised, and important". Greenfield continued. This was coupled with a distancing from the stress of face-to-face, real-life conversation, which were "far more perilous … occur in real time, with no opportunity to think up clever or witty responses" and "require a sensitivity to voice tone, body language and perhaps even to pheromones, those sneaky molecules that we release and which others smell subconsciously".

She said she feared "real conversation in real time may eventually give way to these sanitised and easier screen dialogues, in much the same way as killing, skinning and butchering an animal to eat has been replaced by the convenience of packages of meat on the supermarket shelf. Perhaps future generations will recoil with similar horror at the messiness, unpredictability and immediate personal involvement of a three-dimensional, real-time interaction."

The solutions, however, lay less in regulation as in education, culture and society.

Greenfield argued that the appeal of Facebook lay in the fact that "a child confined to the home every evening may find at the keyboard the kind of freedom of interaction and communication that earlier generations took for granted in the three-dimensional world of the street. But even given a choice, screen life can still be more appealing."

She quoted one user saying they had 900 friends another saying "that you can't see or hear other people makes it easier to reveal yourself in a way that you might not be comfortable with. You become less conscious of the individuals involved [including yourself], less inhibited, less embarrassed and less concerned about how you will be evaluated."

But Greenfield warned: " It is hard to see how living this way on a daily basis will not result in brains, or rather minds, different from those of previous generations. We know that the human brain is exquisitely sensitive to the outside world."

by Patrick Wintour, Political editor

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/feb/24/social-networking-site-changing-childrens-brains

Lost in the city.....

2008-12-22T01:11:00.000-08:00

Dear Friend,

Where to begin? There is so much to deal with today, I guess what I should do is begin at the beginning.

I feel confused, lost and mixed up.

Last night I cried, I felt so alone and confused in my self, so unsure about where I am going, what I am doing.

My life in London seems to consist of a constant fire fighting exercise, where I run as fast as I can on a treadmill in a desperate attempt not to fall off.

I really understand why they call living in this city the rat race, your in a stream and all the rats tightly packed are all running up stream, if you stop, you will be crushed. So the idea is to keep moving forward as quickly as you can, so as to avoid the crush!

I have been feeling this emptiness for such a long time, I have actually forgotten what its like to be really happy. But all is not lost. I have a new weapon in the battle with this emptiness.

Nam myoho renge kyo, is a Buddhist mantra that reveals your buddahood, which is an innate quality in all human beings. This quality allows us to manifest great courage, strength and resolve, for even the darkest of situations. There is a buddhist saying; "turn poison to medicine" and that is what I realise I must do to figure my self out.

Living in London for the last ten years has been quite an experience; I have worked in many different places and met so many wonderful and interesting people. I have grown as a person quite a bit, but I have also felt completely trapped and alone most of the time.

Yesterday I met someone that I have liked for such a long time, but when every I am around them I feel totally invisible, like they dont even see me. I since realised that this is due to the fact that this person is highly self absorbed and wouldnt notice a metorite landing in their back garden.

So Sunday was a day where all the feelings of hurt and lonliness popped out, I had had a Buddhist meeting in my area in the morning, which was followed by a fun few hours with my wonderful grandmother, who I have also been trying to get to chant.

I went and met up with my friend who I have feelings for, but after I left I told them I cant see them any more, due to my feelings. I dont think the comments acctually went in or were really registered.

You know when you are talking to someone and telling them something and they constantly change the subject to talk about stuff they want to talk about, that is what it was like the whole night and it became infuriating.

I since learnt that I am attracting men that are emotional voids, and that due to the fact that I feel so much, I am like a moth to the flame. I am drawn in by their lack of emotion.

Its quite good to have realised this I think, I just now have to take action and attempt to back out of this never ending pattern of hell state!

Nam Myoho renge Kyo

2008-12-04T15:28:00.001-08:00

Well I suppose you would like to know where I have been?

I would too!

I found something called Nichiren Buddhism, which really has given me so much and allowed me to really be my self.

In the last 3 months, I have met some of the most wonderful people and have never felt so good about my self.

You can read more about the man that brought this Buddhist practice to the west here, his name is Daisaku Ikeda, and he is truly a wonderful man.

His warmth and love for regular people still has me in awe, every time I see him.

You can read more about SGI, or the SOKKA Gakki here:
http://www.sgi-uk.org/ and if your in the USA
here: http://www.sgi-usa.org/

This truly is a gift that has been given to the world and I would love to share it with you if you're interested.

I started chanting Nam myoho renge kyo, three months ago and my life hasn't been the same since.

You can see some of my videos on you tube:
http://uk.youtube.com/user/RobbieBobbyBoy

Give it a try or message me on youtube if you have any questions.

Many in body, one in mind!

Focus a thought, a string, a strand, mind, meditation and others

2008-09-22T09:00:00.000-07:00

Every thought that flows through my mind is like a coloured thread, it reaches out and twists and turns around an idea, a person, a place. Each thought had a direction, a desire and a life of it's own. Most of the time I have multiple thoughts, twisting and mixing in my mind all at once. Who am I?, what should I do?, who should I choose?, where should I begin?

The problem with daily life, and being a person as emotionally complex as my self, is that simple tasks, like washing up, putting clothes away, doing WORK, become difficult ot focus on, as while I work or wash or whatever, I am thinking about a million other things at once and I struggle to focus on anything.

Last week I discovered the potential for meditation to help me focus on a particular task. My Grandmother also suggested ZEN, which is the art of acting in the now, focusing your attention at the object or job you are doing, to the exclusion of all other. Obviously if your driving and your 100% focused on the road and nothing else, you could end up brown bread (dead).

So what do we have to focus our minds, ZEN, meditation, extreme sports and that sort of thing.

What do you think about this?

I will remember

2008-08-29T14:25:00.001-07:00

One: I will approve of myself, my characteristics, my abilities, my likes and dislikes, my inclinations and disinclinations, realizing that these form my unique individuality. They are given me for a reason.

Two: I will approve of and rejoice in my accomplishments, and I will be as vigorous in listing these -- as rigorous in remembering them -- as I have ever been in remembering and enumerating my failures or lacks of accomplishment.

Three: I will remember the creative framework of existence, in which I have my being. Therefore the possibilities, potentials, seeming miracles, and joyful spontaneity of Framework 2 will be in my mind, so that the doors to creative living are open.

Four: I will realize that the future is probability. In terms of ordinary experience, nothing exists there yet. It is virgin territory, planted by my feelings and thoughts in the present. Therefore I will plant accomplishments and successes, and I will do this by remembering that nothing can exist in the future that I do not want to be there.

The Angel, I saw

2008-07-19T17:05:00.000-07:00

One dark and cold night, I drove alone and silent. The winding road took me up and down and over and under, passing the cold and wet grassy fields, the smell of moss in my nostrils, the feeling of loneliness in my heart.

I could see the mountains in the distance, dark and mysterious, standing tall like giants, the wind was blowing and twisting around my face as I flew along the dark road, alone and cold.

As I moved up the road and over the dale, the air began to crackle with electricity, the smell of burnt amber lay thick in the air, just above the mountain I could see a warm glow and dark red and amber glow. I thought it was a fire, I thought that maybe the farm on the other side of the mountain was on fire, that the land was burning.

I pulled the car over, and stopped on the side of the road and got out. I sat on the bonnet of my car, and pulled out cigarettes, unwrapped them I had got from the glove box and opened it, smelling the tobacco, breathing in the fresh and warms scent, that I had grown used to.

A loud rumble came from behind the mountain, I looked up, and with out warning, a being of pure light, rose up, as big as the mountain its self, up and up higher and higher, its arms and wings spread, like a giant eagle. It hung in the air, with its chin up, looking to the heavens.

Giant wings beating, and twisting in the air, the clouds swirled and mixed around it. Suddenly it became a pillar of brilliant bright light, the pillar hit the ground and hit the sky, and with out warning, it was gone, deep in to space.

A recap on the disconnection of facebook.

2008-07-03T15:54:00.001-07:00

Months later and I am still connected to the system. After several attempts to de-activate my facebook account, days later I find my self longing to see what "my friends" are up to?

How am I going to do this? When I am not on it, I feel like I am missing out, and missing out the fun... :(

I dont know what to do?

I find it hard to meet people in London, and I guess I use it like that, and its nice to be connected to so many people if you ever need something you gotta just ask.

Anyone can help, I would appreciate it.

A Red Twist in the Dark

2008-04-20T15:06:00.001-07:00

A Red Twist in the Dark - By me April 2008 (Inspired by the feeling of love, life and beyond)

The Lady of the Red Thread.

A twist, a rip, a twirl in the dark.
A dance a trick, a mix with the mark.
She sang, she fell, she wondered alone.
Little did she know, the feeling would grow.

And once she stood, in the red darkness once more.
She realized it was too late, for her heart to beat for.

He stood across the cassim, with her heart in his hands.
He stood there lonely with no place for his plans.

And once the moon, had set in the sky.
The red princess had vanished beyond the eye.

Alone is that place where he was to be.
Alone at the end, only for the love of the darkness, the stars and the sea.

Meditation the answer to all my problems?

2008-04-10T16:43:00.000-07:00

Today I began to meditate.

Could it be the answer I have been looking for?

The search for inner-peace begins.

More to come soon.

A need to feel needed...

2008-03-26T07:28:00.000-07:00

Every human in life has a need; a need to sleep, a need to eat, a need to be loved and a need to love.

As a child I was always very interested in how things worked, I pulled objects apart with a desire to figure out, dissect and understand the inner most workings of most devices. Much to my father’s dismay I would take apart devices such as radios, remote control cars and other bits and bobs around the house. All with the desire to understand how things worked.

As I grew up, I have had relationships, connections and situations, where I am starting to realise, where I transferred this desire, for understanding. I have a desire to understand how people work, what makes them tick. I often forget that people are not machines, and that taking them apart emotionally and mentally just doesn’t work for them and it isn’t a nice feeling.

The relevance of all this is connected to my previous post about procrastination, I am currently on a journey to try to understand why I seem to sit and stare and daydream, why I don’t seem to be able to connect and get things done.

In my previous post, I discovered that from research, chronic procrastination is often brought by some form of depression. I got to thinking, am I depressed? Can I put down all these feelings of lack, loss, confusion, down to depression?

My brother is bi-polar, so severe depression is very close in my family.

The more I think about it, I begin to realise that it could all be connected back to what I need most in my life, something that has been reflected deeply in all my relationships, an almost desperate need to be needed.

I have felt lost and pointless with my career for a very long time, and they only reason I have continued with it is because I am good at it, and it is all I know how to do.

But by its nature, it has no point. Sitting in front of a computer day in and day out, pushing pixels around a screen, is a total waste of a life. I am not changing lives, helping others, making the world a better place. All I am doing is putting money in my account and living, for the sake of living.

My career and job, lacks that VITAL ingredient that I have today realised would bring about my potential and my happiness, THE NEED TO FEEL NEEDED.

I know many of you out there are in this situation, and I realise that it all stems from childhood. We all served certain roles as children and we all learnt certain behaviour that we then project in to our adult lives.

My feelings of being emotionally paralysed are caused my potential depression, but my depression is cause by my lack of purpose. It is a vicious circle that I have been stuck in for years.

I have often said, "how good would it be, to go to work one day and do something totally different, something with real meaning and purpose"

Why I have never acted on this, I do not know.

I always have some excuse; I'm in debt, I can’t change my job, I don’t have time to take on a new career, I can’t do it, etc

This is where these addictions come in, Facebook, GDar, Chat, MSN, it’s a substitute for the human interaction that I AM DESPERATLY craving.

My life needs purpose; I believe I was made for big things.

I was just chatting with my mom (love you mom!!!!!) on the phone about me and why I feel so much for people and things, and it’s my hyper-sensitive being, I feel 100 times more than most people.

As a child I would cry a lot and get upset a lot, I was never very strong.

A penny dropped that maybe with all the people out there that DO NOT know HOW to FEEL, I could potentially help others.

When I have been talking with friends, through their problems, mostly emotional, every single one has always said that I have helped them achieve clarity and I have a gift.

I know that I could become a great healer, mind body and spirit, that is a goal I would like to establish.

Today a door has opened, in a dark recess of my mind a light has switched on, I have realised something about myself, something I have been ignoring for so long.

All I need now is the courage and the strength to stand up and get what I want.

May God and all the Angels, the Universe and everything in it, at this moment, grant me the courage and the strength to reach out and grab it.

Everything happens for reason, everything.

Connected, refresh, rewind, revive, re-establish.

Strife is a natural part of being alive and through my addictions; I could have potentially discovered my freedom and my happiness.

A very good day to you, may you know yourself better with every passing day.

Carl Jung – A life unexamined, is a life wasted.

Addicted to doing nothing...Procrastination

2008-03-24T05:59:00.000-07:00

The dictionary describes addiction as "A physiological and psychological compulsion for a habit-forming substance. In extreme cases, an addiction may become an overwhelming obsession."

I find the bit obsession very interesting, as for most of my life, I have found my self obsessing over one thing or another. Obsession is an interesting emotion, it can be likened to a feedback loop in a software program or the feedback you get when you put a speaker too near a microphone, there is that loud ear busting screech.

Obsession can fast become a debilitating condition that can alter the course of your life. I have found this emotion in many areas of my life, from my self confidence to my work, to my relationships.

I just had a conversation with my wonderful grandmother, she is so amazing, we speak on the phone for hours on end about all sorts of subject from art, philosophy, sexuality, love and more, she told me that with lack of self control, obsession and pathological behavior takes control, she also went on to say that low self esteem and low self image are part of this vicious cycle.

My central question at this very point is, Procrastination. Why do we do it? What does it serve us? Why do we sit and stare out the window, wash the dishes, vacuum the house, talk on the phone, go out with our friends, when we have so much work to do, projects to start, lists to write and opportunities to consider.

If your not sure what I mean, Enda Fleming is the classic procrastinator and is refenced repeatedly in Dante's The Divine Comedy as his refusal to make a decision between good and evil left him locked in purgatory neither ascending to heaven nor descending to hell.

It is about being locked in to a state of disconnect, and confusion, not acctually being able to break out of a situation.

I have often described my emotional state, as being trapped in side a glass box, I can see out, but noone can see in, to help me.

According to my research, procrastination and mental health are connected.

It has been found that procrastination can be a persistent and debilitating disorder in some people, causing significant psychological disability and dysfunction. These individuals may actually be suffering from an underlying mental health problem such as depression or ADHD.

While procrastination is a behavioral condition, these underlying mental health disorders can be treated with medication and/or therapy. Therapy can be a useful tool in helping an individual learn new behaviors, overcome fears and anxieties, and achieve an improved quality of life. Thus it is important for people who chronically struggle with debilitating procrastination to see a trained therapist or psychiatrist to see if an underlying mental health issue may be present.

Severe procrastination can cross over into internet addiction or computer addiction. In this instance the individual has a compulsion to avoid reality by surfing the web or playing video games (game addiction) or looking at online pornography (pornography addiction). Although these are relatively new phenomena, they are being considered as psychiatric diagnoses by mental health professionals.

Makes you think, are you addicted more then you think you are?

I have been wrestling with this puzzle for some time now, my life in London is pretty quiet at the moment, I am single, my job is become a drag and I feel like im loosing touch with my goals. Opportunities pop up all the time for me, but instead of grabbing them, I let things like Facebook, GDAR, msn, going out, day dreaming, get in the way. Why?

On the subject of self esteem and self confidence, it is something I also can not fathom, I have worked hard in trying to accept my self on the outside, but I have not fully accepted my self on the inside, I am in the situation of fake it to win it... maybe I have convinced my self that I am a good looking lad, but I havent really convinced my self that I am good enough or worthy on the inside.

I have bought the Paul McKenna's book, Instant Confidence, it comes with a CD to listen to, as well as exercises to help you feel more confident. There are a lot of exercises and a lot of things to do, and it does all seem like to much hard work, BUT, as Paul says, when you first got on a bicycle, did you just hop on and start riding straight away? No.. you had to practice and practice and practice.

Putting my self down and being negative to my self, is something I have done most of my life, I have had a lot of practice telling my self, I am not good enough, and then when I fail, I beat my self up and put my self down more. It is a vicious cycle, that I have to learn to break. I consider this behavior probably the single most limiting thing in my life, if I could remove my procrastinating, then I could excel and achieve.

In fact I know I WILL SUCCEED and I WILL EXCEL, (thanks Paul hehe)

If you find it hard to get on with things, get things done, I would be interested to hear what you think, on the flip side, if your one of these people that just get the job done, then I would also love to hear from you...

A list of things to do;

1. Do your filing
2. Finish those quotes for your project
3. Bill your clients for various projects (£800 +-)
4. Read some more books

I see the list and know I have to do it, but I zone out, switch off and a screen saver turns on in my mind...

Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep....

A bit like the test pattern at night when tele wasnt on all night.

This never ending circle of thought that does not go anywhere, but take you around and around and around.

It is an addiction, an addiction to nothingness, to mediocre thoughts and lackluster potentials.

An addiction that may not kill me, but it may keep me from becoming the person I have always wanted to be.

Happy Easter Monday.

The New Trend Is The Untrend: Facebook Suicide

2008-03-23T05:36:00.000-07:00

A found this except from Leigh's Blog.

Leigh went on to write..

"I had heard this from someone only last week. Facebook suicide is apparently the new term for early adopters who have had enough with social networking and can't keep up with their latest 5000 friends and decide to get off the Facebook grid.

And now a new blog posting that guides us all through the process of how to quit facebook.

Is this the latest trend? The untrend? Disconnecting from the network? Well, i doubt things will go that far, but it does go to show that once something has crossed the chasm, the window of cool doesn't last all that long. Now the real question will become whether or not that impacts Facebook's business models and/or valuation"

I think its interesting that other people are talking about this too.

Time to disconnect from the system.

Get a real life, not a digital one.

The day I commited suicide

2008-03-22T14:29:00.000-07:00

It is Saturday 22nd of March 2008. The day I died. Yes ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this is the day I committed Facebook Suicide.

It took all of 20 seconds, I hit the account button and then hit on de-activate account and then sent the email asking for all my content to be removed.

I lay on the floor gasping my last breath as the mini-feed gently drip, drip, drip, dripped in the background then it was gone, a distant echo and a defining silence, I began to wonder what I would do, my heart raced and my brow wrinkled.

Am I free, is it that easy? If only i could get rid of msn messenger, email, cell phones, computers, and run away to a distant land where I can be at one with nature, the earth and other human beings.

Change needs to happen, London life has trapped me, I feel I can not breath any more.

My job has become a waste and a disappointment, but I feel a fire inside me a designer, ready to become a graphic designer of extraordinary proportions, I know I have the power with in me, I just wish I could let it out.

If you have a cure for procrastination, please let me know, I think it would save my life.

Today things have been turned upside down, something has shifted and I found something else to think about... how it happened I do not know, all I know is that it shifted.

I stop, listen for the drip, drip, drip, it's gone, it is silent.

I am alone.

Not going that well

2008-02-28T23:55:00.001-08:00

Hello World.

A week has gone by and I have found my self back on Facebook . Things seem to have continued in the same vain as before, I have found my self compulsively checking it every so often, at work.

I have found if I have a reason I check it even more, a met someone at the movies the other night who I quite liked and I kept checking my Facebook , checking for a reply for their message, it wasnt good as I kept thinking about it.

The drip, drip, drip of the mini-feed kept calling me, the subtle call and lure of the digital slot machine.

I wonder if it was such a good idea to go back on to the system? Maybe I am just one of those people where my only healing from an addiction is to cut it out completely?

All or nothing?

What are your thoughts on this? Write to me and tell me about your experiences. How do you manage to limit your msn messenger time, Facebook and other dating and chat sites? Do you feel like these sites take over your free time?

I do think sometimes its nice to sit and chat to people, but wasting time is a different story, when you have a list a mile long of other important things to do, like drawing, washing, tidying up!

I do think I will continue to try wean my self off this, but during my week off from Facebook , I felt I was disconnected and isolated, there was definitely an overwhelming sense of being with-out something.

I do believe it is connected to my need to feel connected to other people, something I am planning on tackeling in the next few months, with maybe some kind of therapy or assistance from a skilled professional.

I want to be able to live my life and not rely on digital technology to feel close to people.

A week off Facebook

2008-02-25T03:14:00.001-08:00

Well Monday has arrived, and it has been exactly one week I have been off Facebook.
I logged in to find 15 messages, 2 wall posts and 15 pokes.
Nice to know people pay attention to me! ha ha.

So after some thought I realised that I wouldnt throw the baby out with the bath water, social networking sites when used correctly can be a useful tool for business and pleasure.

I just have to remember to keep my usage down, with no facebook at work, or on my phone.

Stay tuned as I will continue to write about trends in social networking and how people will remain connected in the next few years.

Internet technologies have always been a passion of mine, so it would make sense I should write about them.

The End of Day 4

2008-02-22T23:08:00.000-08:00

I think its the end of day 4. Not sure, I just woke up at 6:30am.

Some strange nightmare, but I can't go back to sleep, oh well.

So its been 4 days and no Facebook, I've really wanted to go back, but I havent.

Only 3 days to go, can I do it?

How is your facebook addiction coming along?

Facebook Suicide, Second life - End of Day 3

2008-02-21T11:38:00.000-08:00

On a more serious note. As day 3 comes to a close, I got to think about how I didn't really need to be plugged in to the virtual world any more. That maybe, this connection really was just a replacement for contact, that I have been craving in real life.

On the train home, I saw an article in one of free London papers, entitled Facebook BACKLASH - Online phenomenon falters as visitors drop by 5%. I found it quite odd that on the week I decide to flip out about Facebook, its being echoed around the country and world. I hear more and more people are, what is being dubbed, committing Facebook Suicide.

All sounds a bit harsh to me, but I am not far past the thought of committing something.

I was thinking today about SecondLife. It is a huge multi player gaming or world, where people move around in 3d and talk, interact and even have sex! (whoooozers!) yeah! It's true, look it up!

Honestly though, it should be called "Don't have a life? Connect here" I tried it for a few days once and found it dull, a lot of strange looking avatars floating around, pointing and dancing.

There are 5 zillion people connected to it at any one time, and its internal currency where players buy and sell things, makes more money then a small countries G.D.P. (thats the money a country makes in a year, in plain English)

You can read all about the madness of Second Life here.

If you didn't already know, Second life has been the cause of murder (see: http://tinyurl.com/2kk4ub), gambling, pedophilia and a whole host of other crimes, it has become a virtually real world in it's own right.

The worrying part of this system is that it has begun already to take over people's lives, young teenagers in China and in many areas of Asia, are spending up to 9 hours a day, sitting at a computer terminal, "connecting" with people around the world, via the Second Life, interface.

On the surface it may seem harmless, but from my own point of view and the view of many behavioral psychologists. when children "connect" with others on these systems day in and day out, they are missing out the vital experiences and skills to equip them later in life, but substituting real human interaction with this artificial human interaction, it is my belief they are stunting both their emotional growth and physical well being as young people.

Get a real life, not a second one.

VH1 will rot your brain!

2008-02-21T06:13:00.001-08:00

Proof that all the media in the world is driving people to distraction. My mate will was handed this leaflet on Marylebone highstreet, yesterday.

Too many nights plugged in to VH1 I fear.... ha ha ha

The End of Day 2

2008-02-20T16:34:00.000-08:00

Welcome. It is the end of day 2 and I have successfully stayed away from Facebook, msn.
I have however partaken in a bit of internet dating, but I think thats going to have to come under the same banner of banned sites. I wasted at least 2 hours tonight surfing, when I could have been drawing!

I have always been passionate about drawing, but never really given my self the time, primarily because ive been so busy distracting my self with crap.

Tomorrow is a new day, I hope to keep away and not faulter.
I did however today, feel the pull of the drip, drip, drip and the distant call of the mini-feed on facebook, as every one at work uses it.

Stay tuned in to see how I get on.

The End of Day 1

2008-02-19T11:31:00.000-08:00

Well its fast approaching the end of day 1, of my little experiment. Work was surprisingly easy and I managed to stay away from Facebook, msn, skype or any form of time wasting site or service.

I realized that if I could keep this up for long enough I may actually get a lot of shit done.

Self control never came easily to me as a child, teenager or an adult, though how I managed to kick a 20 a day smoking habit, I don't know.

I realised today that I DONT NEED facebook, my life functioned just fine with out it before, infact I used to have loads more fun and get up to all sorts of stuff before.

As the years have gone on, I have relied more and more on msn messenger, myspace, gdar, and other internet chat sites ans services to feed my desire for human interaction.

It has to be said that nothing beats good old fashioned face to face connections.

I also got to think about the things I do'nt do any more; ask you self these simple questions;

1. When was the last time you just sat and read at home, and by read, I mean a real book and not a glossy mag, the news paper or some article on the internet, a real book with real pages, something to exercise that brain, get it to churn and listen and learn, I mean kicked back, turn the TV and computer off and sat back and relaxed and read..? maybe never?

2. When did you last sit back and just listen to music, just lie down and look at the cieling and think about your life, your hopes and dreams, make plans and sing.

3. When did you just pick up the phone and call you friends and arrange something over the phone, instead of sending a text message, an email, or a facebook meeting request.

4. When did you last just go for a walk, just to go for a walk and clear your mind.

All these things you may do or may not do, but I feel that because of my constant "ON STATE" my constant connection to this here system that I am connecting to, you through, I have become a drone.

I sat at my computer the other night, trying to work, trying to get on with some personal project and I just couldn't, it was like there was some kind of dull fuzz, an interference, if you will, that was blocking me. I think I understand what it is now.

It is the constant drip drip drip, of the facebook mini-feed, of the new emails, the new posts on myspace, the drip drip of messages from the meaningless "friends" on msn messenger, that pose as a constant and continuous distraction from every day life, and its array of necessary tasks.

This interference pattern may not occur in all of us, but I do believe that a vast majority of us are very prone to these addictive patterns. It is definitely why gambling, drug addiction, debt and all the other social diseases, we have today have become so rampant in our society.

People are over whelmed with stimuli that it creates this interference pattern in the brain.

I don't know if I will go back to facebook , how I feel after today, I am not sure I will ever use it again, I feel like someone told me a terrible secret and it struck fear in me so deep that I woke up as if from a terrible nightmare, with a huge intake of breath and a cold sweat on my brow.

Only time will tell, but for the moment, it is only day 1 and I do not want to get ahead of my self.

Drip, Drip, Drip I can hear the call of a distant RSS feed, and mini-feed, a message board, the drip, drip, drip of information, slowing calling, longing for my minds connection.

Connect with the drip, drip, drip and soon you will see how the hands on your watch begin to speed up, and faster and faster before the night is gone.

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, as each week flies by, day after day rolling over and over, as the sands of your own personal sand timer begin to speed up, ask your self? Does this connection serve me? Does it add to my life? Or is it sapping my life?

Think, read, write and create, the only forces against the interference, the only way to block it out and stop the consumption and dull muffled overwhelming battle from with-in.

Syncronisities

2008-02-19T06:12:00.000-08:00

After all my ranting and raving over the last few hours, something quite strange has just happend.

My younger brother, who is currently living in South Africa, sent me a link.

http://illuminated.com/

It is a new animated series about a future earth,

Set in the not-too-distant future, planet Earth is being ravaged by rampant environmental change and collapsing economies, as widespread social movements triggered by online interaction are reshaping the face of world politics. Saturated by media, people have lost their ability to dream and plug into a sophisticated communication system each night called the DreamField (similar to the sea shells, from Fahrenheit 451), which gives them access to a virtual dream-state, networked with the rest of the world. Online, dreams have become just another kind of media, and a group of dreamstars have emerged as the culture's new celebrities. Coming from an established political family, Aya is one of the most popular dreamstars, and millions plug into her dreams every night to experience her adventures through a hyper-dimensional vide-game reality, live as they sleep.

The series charts Aya's coming of age as she travels with her guru, Shen, on a transformational journey to visit the most spiritually charged places on Earth - re-connecting with the wisdom-keepers of the planet and re-learning the ancient spiritual traditions to evolve her consciousness and fight to restore humanity's ability to dream and be one with them selves and others again.

An awakening

2008-02-19T02:37:00.000-08:00

I tell you how freaked out I am over this, very.

In this book I am reading, Fahrenheit 451 people stop reading books and the world turns in on its self, because they are PLUGGED IN to this information system.

War rages around them, people die and suffer, but they are numb, numb from the constant, drip drip drip drip.

They have little white seashells (earphones) plugged in to their ears, day and night, listening to the drip drip drip of information.

Their lives consist of sitting, listening, watching, listening and watching, and its freaked me out, because that is where my spare time goes.

Sitting, interacting with these digital ghosts... the Pa lour Family (see the book)

I cant tell you how its freaked me.

To the point I feel quite sick, like I've fallen for some kind of dark trap.

Like I could have woken up from some drug induced sleep.

I know your probably amused by this, but that book was written in 1950s when there were no such things as ear phones and walls of huge TVs.

I cant tell you how this could change my life.

Or maybe it won't, but I feel like something has changed.

A bit more about this book:

Fahrenheit 451 tells the story of Guy Montag; a fireman whose job is not to put out fires – all homes of Bradbury’s future having been fireproofed – but to start them. The firemen’s prime targets are books.

What follows is a poetic and mesmerizing look at a future of censorship that has far too many parallels to modern day consumerist societies. This edition contains an introduction and afterword that is just as interesting as the novel itself. Here Bradbury cites the arrival of MTV and other commercial entertainment as factors that are distracting us, as a society, from the essential knowledge found in libraries.

(Robbie says: What freakes me most, about this is how many of my friends never read, who dont read books, there is perhaps a whole generation growing up, who dont read, could this book be more of a truth then I thought)

He notes that such firemen are not needed anymore because we are doing the job for them.

Also explained is the genesis of the book itself. The author describes how F451 has its origins in 5 short stories including a surreal-sounding one based on an experience of his being stopped by a police patrol car just for walking down the street.

A superbly written book that has eerie similarities with the world today.

Written over 50 years ago.

Admitting is the first step to solving your addiction.

2008-02-18T13:44:00.000-08:00

Hello World.

Tonight is the first night, I sat down and realized that I have a problem.

Since I began using the internet way back in 1997 I have chatted on line, it all began with IRC, for all your young folk, IRC is a short name for Internet relay chat, its what people used to use to chat with, thousands of chat rooms, about every type of thing. Think of a person, a fetish, an idea and you will find a chat room on IRC on some IRC server somewhere.

I have wasted countless hours chatting to random people about meaningless crap, and today i realized that it has to stop.

I want to have a happy, fruitful and full life, but I spend way too much time chatting and trying to connect with people, that don't honestly give a damn. It is an addiction and I think I can finally say that I am hooked and I have been hooked for a long time.

You ask, whats so bad about it, if its not actually hurting me? Well I will tell you whats wrong with it... it is like a silent thief, whats it stealing? I hear you say; well i would say one of the most important things and most priceless things we could ever own in our lives...

Time...

Hours and hours and hours of my life have been lost, doing piss all sitting chatting, and connecting with people, and things that do not count.

Us watching them, watching them watching us? Why what for?

It all feeds some deep and hidden human desire, the fear of being alone..

But tonight I realized that it has to stop, its holding me back.

With the recent onset of Facebook in to my life, it has taken an even bigger chunk of my personal and free time, I check it on my phone, I check it at work, I check it at home, I check it when I get up in the morning and before I go to sleep at night...

Checking, looking, watching, hopeing waiting, wondering, checking, updating, updating, adding, watching, looking... and what for? Why?

So I can feel connected to my friends and family? Its all a lie, you want to know how I really feel? I couldn't feel more disconnected from people.

It is so impersonal, all people do, is just message you, and arrange things over Facebook, noone can be bothered to pick up the phone.

MSN messenger is the same, I have countless "friends" on msn messenger that are always online, we chat, and talk about meaningless bollox for hours and hours, when I should be working studying, learning, talking to friends, drawing, running, and all the other stuff I should be doing in my life.

These technologies only create an excuse for people not to interact in real life, they take the human out of human contact, and Ive had enough.

So today is Monday 18th of February 2008 and I am going to cut it all out, first for a week and then see how I feel, see what happens if I can survive with out it.

Its become so in-grained in my life, its going to be worse then when I managed to give up smoking, which I did COLD TURKEY after a 20 a day habit.

So if your interested and you have got this far, come with me on this little journey I am going to take you on.

The thing is, my job is Internet based, I work on the web, I work as a digital designer for a London media agency, so it will be hard, but I am going to do it, I think my life will be a lot better off. Actually writing about it here, is a very cathartic experience, I hope that I can offer some advice and solace for any other poor soul that feels like I do, about this disease.

A very digital addiction.