Addicted to Social Media and Multitasking?

Consider this: the average American watches more than four hours of TV each day. In a 65 year life, that person will have spent nine years glued to the tube and seen 2 million commercials, with over 53 percent of viewing time focused on crime, disaster and war. Recent studies show that texting while driving makes people 8x more likely to suffer a serious car accident.

Sundays Church's bulletin was interesting and had to do with Saint Peters second reading which says "Sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts." (Peter 3:15) In the days when most people could not read or write, storytellers kept the community connected with tales that were entertaining, thought provoking and informative. Nowadays, public story telling is almost a forgotten art.

Many us must "multi task" in an attempt to be more productive and efficient, but with the rise of the Internet, blogs, texting, Facebook, Twitter, something new is emerging, which has been called "continuous partial attention" paying partial attention or continuously scanning for the best opportunity, activities, and contacts at any given moment.

Multi tasking allows us to stay in face-to-face connection with people, but continuous partial attention can isolate us in our own little bubble, watching a screen, often with negative consequences.

Saint Peters reading just reinforced the loss of story telling and I loved how the father continued speaking on this. Even though every one multi tasks, I don't think we realize just how much we do it. "This is a clear indication of what should be the single more important thing in our lives, from which everything else flows- how we prioritize our daily life, how we spend our time, our relationships with other people, how we use our abilities, and how we use our resources."

Being Catholic is an important part of who I am and how I live my life. I love being able to write about this and how it connects important parts of my life, being catholic, day to day activities, multitasking, social media etc.

So get off the computer, Facebook, Twitter for an just an hour a day and go outside, call a friend, run outside, go to the dog park, volunteer- do something new and concentrate on just that one thing.

When was the last time you were multitasking? What's some advice you have for getting away from our social media habits?

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