Theyve Logged Off. Can You?

Three days into the detox,Netra Parikh over 5,400 followers,20,000-plus tweets,who works for a digital brand management company in Mumbai,went into withdrawal,and was unsure if shed pull through. I was used to tweeting a hundred times or more every day. Twitter was like oxygen to me. But I knew I needed offline activities to balance my online world,so I started using the time to do things I had always wantedyoga,morning walks and other real-world activities, she says. Parikh no longer feels the need to tweet incessantly,but is still on Twitter to keep in touch with her online friends,some of whom have become real-life palsshe has started a Sunday breakfast club of 78 Twitter friends who catch up every week at Just Round the Corner restaurant in Bandra.

The detox helped Parikh parse the noise of Twitter,disconnect one of her mobile phones,and delete her accounts in 15 social networking sitesshe is still part of about 25 sites,most of which she doesnt visit every daybut she admits she cannot sever all her connections with the digital world. She gets 70-100 email a daynot including messages from Twitter and Facebookand carries her BlackBerry with her almost everywhere,even when on holiday. My whole world is online. I cant stay away for too long, she says.

Its a common condition in a technology-overloaded world. We overestimate our ability to multitask,we are happy to juggle email,phone calls,text and instant messages,social network updates,blogs,news feeds and videos,not suspecting that the barrage of information we subject ourselves to is changing the way we think,understand,imagine and communicate. In a paper in Science last year,developmental psychologist Patricia Greenfield argued that the use of screen-based media has strengthened visual-spatial abilities while dumbing down higher-order cognitive processes like abstract vocabulary,mindfulness,reflection,inductive problem solving,critical thinking and imagination. Its a condition Nicholas Carr,in his new book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains,terms shallowness. Recent studies in the neurology of multitasking by Clifford Nass,a Stanford University cognitive scientist,and psychologists Eyal Ophira and Anthony D. Wagner have shown a distinct correlation between media consumption habits and the ability to focus on information. Heavy users of technology,the research suggests,are likely to be distracted even when they are not using it.

Shashwat Nagpal,a 31-year-old Delhi-based graphic designer,who spends every waking hour on technologyon his blog,on Facebook and Twitter,with his iPhone and his DSLR camerasays it has changed him as a person. He is an introvert now. I used to go out with my college buddies for drinks,now I have cut down on social outings. And whenever I do have to attend a party,I always itch to update my Twitter or Facebook profile every five minutes, he says. He doesnt dine with his parents anymore,preferring to eat at his study table. When he meets someone new,Nagpal says he doesnt use his personal observation or instinct to form an opinion of the person. Instead,he logs on to the internet and checks him out on a social networking site and then decides whether or not to interact with him in the future. I think those tiny virtual bits of information are more efficient in assessing someone than intuition or instinct, he says.

Bhawna Barmi,a senior consultant psychologist at Fortis-Escorts hospital in Delhi,says she has been getting a lot of clients under the age of 35 with relationships altered by the excessive use of technology. Over the past year,Twitter,Facebook and BlackBerry messaging have become the biggest disasters for relationships,most of all between spouses, she says. The doctor says its not just the time consumed by technology,but also reduced energy which is affecting personal relationships. These activities drain you. The result is that you are too tired to talk to your partner, she says. She cites the case of a 40-year-old man and a 35-year-old woman who are now living separately,their marital discord exacerbated by the internet. The man was using the internet too often,for too long and at the wrong time. And he never made amends,he didnt sense it was a factor in their marriage, she says. Barmi calls internet overuse a silent addiction. It becomes a part of our lifestyle,just like television has. When the TV is on in the bedroom,people don8217;t connect with each other or with themselves.

Its one thing to be able to see why and how technology is affecting us,but quite another to kick the habit. Some websites are coming to the rescue of users who are beginning to realise they cannot resist the excesses of the internet; for seasoned addicts there are rehab clinics such as ReSTART,in Redmond,US.

In some cases,the train may have already left the station. It has been three months since Amit name changed on request,a 31-year-old software engineer with a multinational company in south Bangalore,lost his girlfriend of four years to his internet addiction. He would often work from home,as it allowed him to constantly toggle between writing code,responding to official communication,reading half-a-dozen soccer blogs,checking three email accounts every half hour,watching Vimeo and YouTube videos,playing Zynga Poker on Facebook,following over 500 people on Twitter,chatting with his former classmates in California,maintaining a virtual pet,checking online stores for bargains and participating in tech forums. When I was awake,I was online. I couldnt stand being disconnected for more than an hour. It felt like I was missing something. At first,my girlfriend thought I was just busy with work,but when I bought an iPhone and an ultraportable notebook and started using them when we were out for dinner or shopping,it was obvious to her that I was addicted, he says.

When he began consulting a psychologist two months ago to help cut back on his internet use,he was startled by the fact that he was missing the internet more than he did his girlfriend. I am going home for a month in Novembermy parents live in Nagaon in Assam,there is no broadband there. I am not going to carry my laptop or mobile internet connection with me, he says.

In 1995,a Newsweek article called the internet hype and a wasteland of unfiltered data. Today,its a restless,fathomless world rigged with social networking booby traps. Some have tried to extricate themselves from the web of their own making,and failed. For Sachin Khosla,a Delhi-based 26-year-old software engineer who decided to take a hiatus from self-indulgent tweeting,the ignominy of having fewer followers was enough to break his resolve. The only time I wasnt wired was when I was asleep, he says. He would tweet from his mobile phone day and nightwhile working,while driving,and before going to sleep in the early hours. A bachelor who lived alone,he stopped going out for dinnerwhy disrupt your online activities when you can order pizza instead? Several dozen sleepless nights and pizzas later,he decided to disable GPRS on his phone and use the internet only at work. I put myself on this test for a month. But at the end of it,I had withdrawal symptoms. I used to be famous on Twitter. A lot of people were following me. Now,I saw they were beginning to un-follow me because of my infrequent tweets. I didnt want that, he says.

This is exactly the kind of relapse Aparna Andhare,a self-confessed tweet voyeur,was scared of,so much so that she deleted her Twitter account a month ago. It was a leap the 24-year-old television producer had to take when she enrolled in an MA programme at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. I was afraid I would be reading more tweets than post-colonial literature, says Andhare whos discovering the gains of staying offline. I am saving a hell lot of time. I am researching more. I am tidying up my room now. I am connecting to people on a one-to-one basis,by phoning them,IMing them and e-mailing them. I am back to writing longer e-mails. Now,when I stand on a street,I look around and notice things,instead of tweeting, she says.

Often,a life-changing events can trounce the seduction of the internet. In Khoslas case,it was the coming of a life partner and a child. When his fiancee complained that he wasnt talking to her as much as he should,he had to ditch Facebook and Twitter for more time on the phone with her. Now married and the father of a newborn,Khosla times his internet activity,going online only between 8 pm and 10.30 pm every day. I am no longer online 24215;7, he says.

Not everyone waits for a change to cut down on their Internet time. Sundeep Mahal,a 32-year-old IT project manager in Gurgaon,draws a graph of his internet use. There was a time when I wanted to be everywhere,on ICQ,on personal webpages hosted by Yahoo and Google,on all email services,then on all social networking sites. Now,Ive plateaued and use the internet more as as a knowledge tool,only logging onto Google reader to catch up with news and sharing information about a new gadget or technology on Twitter, says Mahal,who in 1996,took great pride in being the first among his peers to connect online with a friend who had gone to the US. His only online entertainment-related activity is viewing movie trailers on YouTube. It has been a gradual change. Ive come to realise that nothing can replace the real human social connection. Sitting in my room and waiting for the person on the other end to type,without being able to see his/her body language,means nothing compared to sharing a laugh with loved ones in real life, he says.

Khosla,for whom the internet is the preferred mode of communication,is perhaps yet to convert to that perspective. My daughter was born at 8.31 am,I uploaded her pictures on Facebook and Twitter at 8.55 am and within a couple of hours,I got 60 comments. Compare this to the fact that I got hardly 20 phone calls over two days after her birth, says Khosla,who tweets pictures of traffic jams whenever he is caught in one.

In an age of ambiguous work-life boundaries,technology is often an occupational hazard. Strategic communications and PR counsel Sanjiv Kataria,who checks his BlackBerry the first thing in the morning and the last thing at night and is almost always reachable by email,fondly remembers a time,a few years ago,when people werent expected to be online 24215;7. During daylong meetings at NIIT Technologies,where I was group executive vice-president,marketing communications,we would have two or three slots of 15 minutes each to check email, he says,adding that he knows executives with high-pressure jobs who are now trying to go offline on weekends.

Its a concept Mumbai businessman Ralphy Jhirad and his family have always followed. Practising Jews,they do not use electronic equipment on Saturdayusing electricity is considered a violation of the Biblical law of not lighting a fire on the day of rest. On Sabbath,Jhirads sons Nathaniel and Avniel switch off their mobile phones,forgo their daily e-dose of The New York Times and Facebook updates,miss Manchester United games,and dont mind it all in the least. Nathaniel,who is in his second year of college,says Saturdays are for sleeping,praying,thinking about the week that has passed and spending time with his family and friends. Its a beautiful feeling. Time stops. And when the day is over,you are much clearer,composed and in control, he says. Inspired by the quiet of Sabbath,the Jhirads have made a conscious decision to not buy a TV. The family shares a laptop and the children dont clamour for Internet time,using it for not more than an hour or two per day. Sounds nostalgic? Thats because it is.