This is morning in America in the Internet age. After six to eight hours of network deprivation — also known as sleep — people are increasingly waking up and lunging for cellphones and laptops, sometimes even before swinging their legs to the floor and tending to more biologically urgent activities.

Well, I’ll admit. I suffer from this illness. After waking up with Maya and feeding her milk, I start the coffee machine and power up my laptop. I check my personal email and the news first. Maya likes music and since I can conjure up playlists on the fly, I start Maya’s morning music on my laptop. She likes being held for a little while after she wakes and so I rock her gently to the music. Next, I fire up my work email. If a work email seems urgent, I’ll respond even on a non-working day.

Reading this article, I wondered why this habit of checking email, Twitter and Facebook the moment we wake up ? In my case, I developed this habit of checking email and reading news as I read coffee because most days I was by myself. Shanthala was already at work and reading the email was a way to prepare for the coming day. Reading the news had taken the place of reading the paper newspaper. After I quit working every day, I continued in this habit partly because I was addicted and partly because nothing much had changed for me, Shanthala was still away at work when I awoke. I didn’t do anything to change this habit once Maya was born.

And why do we become email, social media and cell phone junkies, checking them constantly ? Why do we want all these popup messages and sounds to tell us that we have mail or that a friend has logged on or logged off or that they posted a Twitter update ? I justified my behavior by rationalizing that I receive 100-200 emails a day, that trying to process them as they arrive seems a more manageable task than batch processing them. This is the main reason I like to download my email even when I’m on vacation. Trying to process 3000 emails after a week’s vacation seems so exhausting that I’ll need a vacation immediately after.

Many blogs and articles talk of the inability of people to keep up with their email load and so check it constantly to stay on top, failing to do anything else. It’s a new treadmill, rigged to go so fast, there is not even the time to breathe. It’s fall off or keep sprinting. Most of us think it impolite or unmanly to not respond to every email that is addressed to us (excluding spam, of course). As one article puts it:

Welcome to the future. E-mail was going to make our lives heaven on earth and provide easy communication that would bring us closer to our loved ones. It did. Mom now sends us “funny” jokes daily. Ha ha. And she forwards chain letters from little boys dying of cancer who just need one more postcard to break the world record(*). Then the business world got e-mail. Spam was a problem for a while, but now it’s our well-intentioned colleagues, clients, and customers filling our inbox, quietly selling us into e-mail slavery.

In the past few weeks, starting with when we stayed with our friends in Palo Alto, I checked my email far less frequently, about three times a day and it didn’t seem as hard to deal with. A majority of them could be deleted right away. Only a handful required me to respond. I also turned off email notifications by accident one day, and haven’t missed it. Lawrence Lessig, a key figure in the online community, tells of his radio silence for a month every year: no emails, no cell phone, no social media, nothing. During this time, his automatic vacation response asks the sender to email back in a month’s time if the issue is important and needs his attention, otherwise the email goes into a dead letterbox.

I’m reminded of how we deal with telephones in India, or at least used to when I was growing up. Telephones started off as a luxury item, an expensive item, used when there was something important to discuss, not to be used frivolously. In the absence of an answering machine, we dropped everything we were in the middle of and rushed to silence the insistent ring. As the telephone became more ubiquitous, the ring could be a friend calling to save us from the ennui of the day or maybe something had happened to some dear. How could we not answer the phone when it called ?

A part of me also wonders how people reacted once receiving daily newspapers became a common habit. Now, instead of sitting outside and enjoying the sunshine or saying “good morning” to our neighbours or watching people go by, people were sitting inside reading a piece of paper, carrying stories from far away, much farther than our front porch in any case. The grass was always greener, the lives more interesting, the farther away they were.

A friend told me the other day that some of his friends who are college grads are hard to make time with. “They’re in the BBD zone”, he told me, “Bigger, Better Deal. Not willing to commit to any time right now because they might lose out on something better showing up between now and then”. So, they check their email, cell phone, social media updates constantly, looking for a BBD.

So I wonder if at the heart of all these complaints is the question of engagement with people we’re with instead of the people we want to be with, a question of being here now instead of constantly planning on being somewhere at 8 tonight, a question of using some time to reflect rather than passively absorb, a question of wisdom instead of just a firehose of information.

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? – T. S. Eliot