Do the happiest people neglect the Internet?
Nicholas Carr once said, “People in love leave the sparsest data trails.” This is a seemingly simple statement: that those people who are in love or who love other people aren’t going to be using the internet nearly as much as others. This does suggest a connection between personal happiness and fulfillment and how much we feel the need to go on our mobile devices, our computers, etc. This seems to be going with the obvious idea that technology takes away from our daily lives. If we are in love, we won’t be wanting to, for example, post on twitter all the time, because we’ll be busy actively living our lives with the people we love. Some might take offense to this statement, pointing out that it implies that if they are frequent internet users, they are not in love with anyone. If a married couple is addicted to technology, how happy and healthy can they really be? The thing is, I think we already do generally think this. We do think that the happiest people will go without technology the most easily. This relates back to “The Useless Agony of Going Offline”, in which the author points out that we often see technology as a demon that the most accomplished of people can get rid of. I think that Carr might not truly mean this statement, along with many of his other statements, but says these things to provoke discussion and hard thinking about the values we place on technology.
