THE HIJACKED MIND

I was dragged kicking and screaming into the world of computers and the Internet. Somehow my gut feeling led me to avoid this new technology. However, as fate would have it, good friends of ours were updating their computer and it was going for a song. Once installed, like the telly, it becomes the centre of our universe. However, unlike the telly, it is now portable and accompanies most of us wherever we are. Our minds have become hijacked by the Internet.

Now, I find myself trying to wean myself away from the temptations of "surfing the net". Whatever your interests or obsessions may be, there is a multitude of sites, forums etc to distract you from your business or daily routine. But of course one might argue that its only the same process that strted with  speech and then the written word, then radio etc. But this is the point- all these mediums have the power to distract us from "reality", the natural world and of course from our fellow humans. The difference between the various mediums is their relative power to distract and entrance. I note that the author of the 70's book "Four Arguments for the Elimination of TV", Jerry Mander has also more recently written about the Internet. The issues are the same.

So, when we see people walking the streets, on the metro, in the restaurant, absorbed with their I-phones and other gismo's we are observing hijacked minds. We have allowed our minds to be taken over by the practitioners of the net- be it the news networks, blogggers (like me here!) or Tweeters. 

So perhaps it is worth contemplating how much time we spend in this manner and whether perhaps we could be creative rather than just a spectator of life. This latter mode I believe to be our proper purpose in life- to be co-creators with God of our own reality. If we succumb to the net, fascinating as it can be, we are declining the offer, during that period, of being creative. So, on that note I will sign off and get creative!