"People are spending too much time surfing the internet,
gradually becoming removed from social life, and totally
alienated to the point of severing themselves from reality."
This is what a new research study in the U.S.A. claims.
According to this study, which received a lot of attention
in the American media, spending hours staring at a computer
surfing freely within the vast breadth of the internet
weakens family ties and relationships with friends and
causes mental damage to the viewers.
Those who headed the academic research study, Dr. Norman
Neil of California's Stanford University and Prof. Lutz
Erbring of Berlin University, announced that the findings
clearly show that "the more one uses the internet--living in
a virtual world- -the less time one spends with real
people."
This research is one of the most extensive of its type, and
first in trying to discern the social influence the internet
has on private life. Other research projects conclude that
the internet is a type of addiction, like alcohol,
chocolates, cigarettes, gambling, and narcotics. The
designers of the new research say their findings "echo
previous findings" and also reveal the damaging results of
such addiction. An Israeli newspaper for computer-users
recently wrote that another research study also prepared in
Stanford University concluded that in ratio to the time
spent on the internet a person gradually develops a "certain
degree" of depression and social isolation and other similar
signs of a bipolar psychiatric disorder (the modern term for
manic-depressive). For some of these disorders, the experts
explain, one can obtain efficient medical treatments.
"Undoubtedly we are talking about internet-mania," defined
Dr. Nathan Shapira of the Medical College of Cincinnati
University.
The concern about the mental damage caused by the computer
bothers many in the Western World. Dr. David Greenfield, a
psychologist from Hartford, Connecticut, authored a new book
dealing with addiction to the internet called Virtual
Addiction. He also carried out a series of research
studies that show the damage of modern addiction.
The abundance and technological progress of modern times
presents us with a variety of possibilities on how to spend
our time and become engulfed in vanities. People are slowly
revealing that this progress is to their disadvantage. The
surplus of technological means make modern man dizzy since
even if he uses all the time he has available and even if he
would live to a thousand years he could not enjoy the wide
spectrum of possibilities there are to "kill" time.
The Israeli economic newspaper Globes recently
published a special supplement on communication, in which
one of its writers dared raise the question, "What are we
going to do with five hundred channels? Who is capable of
watching all the shows the satellites, the cables, and the
public and commercial networks offer us?" The article was
written after hearing the joyous cries within "progressive"
Israeli society when it was announced that soon
communication companies will supply to those addicted to
entertainment, hundreds of television channels. Dave Rolar
writes in irony: "Five hundred channels. You say it is
wonderful? Endless free time to watch TV and all through the
satellite dish! Fine. But how will we benefit from it? Five
hundred channels, twenty-four hours a day, minus the hours
we sleep. Make the calculation. How can we enjoy all this?
But before you feel frustrated about your inability as mere
mortals to watch all the splendid programs the networks want
you to see, pay attention to the key word: satellite
dish. It is not accidental."
The writer shows us how absurd and impossible it is to
satiate ourselves from such abundance by a parable from
life: "They send us with a dish to a wedding buffet and
allow us to fill it with all of the best foods. What happens
to us in this free cafeteria? Some of us fearing nothing
will be left fill the dish with as much food as possible. We
return gingerly to the table with the dish full to-the-brim,
with mountains of meat dripping with fats, and potatoes in
chumus swimming inside the salad sauce. We just hope no one
is looking at us when we sit down and try to stuff
ourselves.
"Apart from the fact they are injecting the five hundred
channels into our veins in the darkness of our living room
and not in a wedding hall, it is a comparable situation. Our
capacity is the same. In both incidents we eventually desert
the dish, leave the knife and fork sticking in the half-
bitten pulkeh or burnt eggplant salad, and leave the
cherry on the whipped cream, and bury half a cigarette in a
semicircle in the cake. All this is an incriminating
testimony of our disgust when we felt we had enough, more is
impossible, not even another bite."
In conclusion, he asks the inevitable question: "Why
actually do we feel pressured to enjoy the five hundred
channels the networks are so generously allotting us?"
@Big Let Body=Let us, however, reflect upon these odd
incidents through the viewpoint of HaRav Moshe Chaim
Luzzatto zt'l, the author of the Mesillas
Yeshorim. We will discern that modern addiction to an
inexhaustible wealth of entertainment means and ways of
passing the time reveals the power of accelerated
development, an ancient enemy whose sophisticated plots are
increasing.
The Mesillas Yeshorim (chap. 2) writes that this
situation is similar to what the posuk
(Yirmiyahu 8:6): "Everyone turns to his own course as
the horse rushes into the battle" teaches us. Life's race
prevents man from listening to his neshomoh and to
the spiritual demand directed to him. He pursues vanities
and forgets his real obligation in this world. "This is
truly one of the schemes of the yetzer hora and the
way it beguiles people. It continually gives people more
work to bother them until they have no time to think or see
in which way they are heading. [The yetzer hora]
knows if people would pay only a little attention to what
they were doing they would immediately regret what they have
done. Their regret would increase until they would forsake
sin altogether.
This is similar to Pharaoh's advice when he said
(Shemos 4:9): "Let more work be laid upon the men,
that they may labor in it and let them not regard vain
words." Not only did he not intend to leave them any time to
plan against him, but he tried through endless work to
prevent them from thinking at all. This is exactly what the
yetzer does to people, since it is a warrior and
experienced in shrewdness. It is impossible to escape from
it except with much wisdom and tremendous foresight."
The yetzer's scheme of "Let more work be laid upon
the men" has always pursued mortals. In modern days the
yetzer has sophisticated its ways radically. That
"moment of quiet" about which Maran the Chazon Ish
zt'l writes in the beginning of Emunah
Uvitochon is a hard and fast condition for attaining
emunah, which is drastically missing in our times.
Surfing the internet's vanities and the endless wandering
between various entertainment options and hundreds of
different TV channels, distances modern man more and more
from wanting to seek the truth and attaining it. Progress is
being laid heavily upon men and is making them behave "as
the horse rushes into the battle."
