Column:
Resisting the Net's Allure
Published April 25, 2008
Connection sounds like a great thing.
We love to be connected — to our family, our friends, a 24/7 feed of news from The New York Times, Gawker and whatever else. I carry a laptop around in my messenger bag and can access that information at any second. If I were cooler and wealthier, I’d be able to do much of that with an iPhone.
When did this happen? My thesis focuses on Russia in the 1860s and ‘70s, and back then the best way to connect directly with the people en masse was a monthly column and fiction. Can we even compare those days to now? Walk into a J school auditorium and check out the unearthly glow of a hundred Apple laptops for your first sign that revolutionary is most certainly a relevant word.
Sometimes it’s easy to forget how much this has changed even within my own lifetime. As kids, my friends and I all hung out in malls and never had cell phones to find each other. If we didn’t have a set time and meeting spot, we’d simply end up lost.
Computers and the Internet were also new things that hit in grade school. Dial-up crawled and the Oregon Trail helped make grade school awesome.
Now? Now I’ve got the instinct to check my e-mail 30 times a day, and I deal with the urge to check not only news Web sites, but also news blogs and music Web sites constantly. Facebook.com accompanies the daily grind. Print is dead, only to be replaced by a new world of connections and YouTube. All my work revolves around the laptop, around the Internet, around always being connected.
I dig this in a lot of ways. Who would want to trade this saturation in information? Yet the increase also has costs. I was scanning the Internet the other day, and one news item in particular caught my eye. The New York Times headline: “In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop.” The stress of blogging might, in fact, be killing folks. Killing them! The need to update constantly and be ready to type off coherent text for scores of readers is a new, unique, omnipresent strain. Even picturing a sweating, stressed guy with his finger on the “post entry” button makes this hard to believe, but what a concept, right?
In Keith Gessen’s new novel, one pretentious character laments his “shrinking Google” and calls the search engine up to complain. His hits had dropped from like 300 to 50. That’s taking a preoccupation with faceless Internet attention a little far.
It’s almost too easy to forget a life without Google and constant connection, a whole world shouting at you with the click of a mouse. For me, spring break in Key West was a refreshing vacation not just from school, but from my laptop. I lacked e-mail or any connection bigger than a cell phone and I didn’t have to give a damn about keeping track for a few days.
Like I said, though, I’m no Luddite and I’m not making any Transcendentalist call to return to our roots and nature.
These are exciting times and I’m curious to see just how much more connected we’ll be getting in the next 50 years. The ever-present buzz of information can be a bit much, but all it requires is the self-control to close the Internet browser and stay away from Facebook.com or wherever when I need to get work done.
And honestly, distractions like Stuff White People Like make any day better, rendering these other qualms meaningless.
