My name is Rabbi Yonah, and I am over-wired.
Tethered to my iPhone. Waiting for the ding or buzz to announce some new tidbit of information. Someone re-tweeted. Breaking news from who-knows-where. Is that a txt message? An appointment?
At the office the routine doesn’t change. Even on vacation, no roaming farther than my portable WiFi hotspot can find service.
The intended consequences of our wired world creates such a host of distractions and interruptions that it’s a wonder some days that I manage to get anything accomplished.
Even before I became a permanent IP address in the great server in the sky, I discovered the Jewish Sabbath during college and fell in love with unplugging from the info-byte matrix. Finding a home in personal connections and spiritual devotion provided an oasis in time to refresh my soul.
While Sabbath observance is often dismissed as archaic, attitudes are changing as the pace of information and methods of delivery are unrelenting.
I am not the first to realize that over-connectedness is a harmful side-effect of our digital world, interfering with our personal, spiritual, and professional lives.
We are starting to recognize the dangers of addiction to being connected to a device-based community at the loss of real conversations and communications that take more than 140 characters.
As a response, my friends at Reboot created The National Day of Unplugging, a tech-detox day, in 2010.
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