How to be happy in a digital age
How to be Happy in a Digital Age airs Friday, January 1 at 6 a.m. on CBC Radio One.
Social media promises to connect us with others, but is it causing us to feel more alienated than ever before? We're encouraged to share online, but does seeing the exciting lives of people in your feeds make you feel worse about your own?
This one hour special, "How to be happy in a digital age", steers us in the right direction and offers advice on how to break bad habits, deal with haters on the internet and find the right balance between our online and in-real-life communications.
Host Jamey Ordolis and producer Rosie Fernandez get helpful insight from a variety of guests and experts in this hour:
Sherry Turkle is a noted American scholar and writer who has spent the past 30 years studying the psychology behind our relationship with technology. She says, "People feel that they have the right to go to their phones with the person they're with right there before them. That is an empathy destroyer because you're training yourself not to think, 'I wonder how that's going to make the people I'm with feel… that as they're telling a story, I'm going to my phone' ". Her latest book is called Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in the Digital Age.
"If everybody sort of stifled themselves then we wouldn't be quite so overwhelmed with all this stuff, so much of which isn't of interest," says Vint Cerf, one of the "Fathers of the Internet" itself. He's currently Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google. And he thinks that "We ought to be thoughtful of each other and be, perhaps, a little more parsimonious in our use of all these different avenues for drawing peoples' attention."
Author Christina Crook, whose book The Joy of Missing Out: Finding Balance in a Wired World introduces a cure for FOMO, answers user questions about our top tech anxieties. "So, FOMO is the fear of missing out. JOMO is a play on that, it's the joy of missing out. The joy that we can find when we step away from the constant real-time updates through Twitter and Instagram and all of our different feeds. We don't need to be always worried and anxious about the things that we're missing out on, but actually, maybe there might be a little bit of fun when we step away."
"Social influencer" family Matt Barnes, Shelley Hayes and Goldie Valentine find a lot of joy living online. He's a photographer and director, she's a floral designer and stylist and Goldie's just about the coolest kid on Instagram. But even they need to walk away from the feeds sometimes. "I know sometimes if I'm not feeling good and I'm looking through Instagram, and I start to feel that kind of envy when you look at other people's accounts …it doesn't feel good," Shelley says. "So if I'm at that point I'm hoping that I can be more self-conscious about what's happening and just put my phone away and go do something different, even if it's going for a walk."
On the topic of over-sharing, award-winning digital producer and new mom Amanda York says, "Some people will really want to see and hear everything about your major life events and your kids and others will be upset that you're clogging up their feed with all your stuff. My best strategy is to separate conversations for people who are interested. For example, for Rocco, we decided to create a Facebook page under his name for family and friends. And he'll have it as a nice digital history of his life - like a multi-media, social, collaborative photo album."
Plus seasoned television producer Andy Nulman has an interesting take on how the haters can bring out the lovers online, and writer Greg Chociej warns against the dangers of "phone face" and the rise of selfie deaths (they've taken more lives this year than sharks!).
You can find the host of this special, Jamey Ordolis, on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook and check out her blog at Empirella.com. Rosie Fernandez produced the show and you can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.