2006.03.20
No I am not responding to the detailed description of your latest bowel movement. I am talking about my beloved Internet and my fear that it is damaging my brain. I have a list of sites and feeds that I must read everyday. It is a compulsion now. I must devour these links and links of links or I start to feel a pressure build. Are all these news tidbits, interesting facts, funny videos and other trivia being recorded into my neurons at the expense of other memories and information? On the other hand I am almost watching no television these days, not even movies on television. If all this new information is only pushing out memories of all the episodes of Gilligan's Island I watched as a kid it isn't that bad, right?
Suppose you have an hour of free time. What do you want to do in that hour? Here are some possibilities: 1. read a book, 2. talk to a friend, 3. watch TV, 4. read/watch/listen to something online, 5. meditate, 6. exercise, 7. play a game. Of course there are more, but those are just a few that just came to me. Are some of those activities better than the others? As with almost all questions, the answer is, "it depends." Who is the friend? What is the book? Will the activity "improve" you in some way, or have some kind of payback in the future? Or is being interesting and entertaining now in the present moment enough? It seems like people have an instinct for what is and isn't a waste of time. I sometimes wonder how much of these instincts are actually true.
I think the common answer to these questions about how to live is still the best. That answer being "The Golden Mean", or keeping all things in moderation. We can still ask what and how much moderation, but even those questions should be kept in moderation! In this sense maybe my voracious consumption of Internet information is too much. Or maybe it just seems that way because so many of our options for spending free time (books, radio, TV, telephone, etc.) have been collapsed down into one tool: the Internet.
--Old blog comments:
March 22nd, 2006 at 12:16 am
jer Says:
I know how you feel. During the week I watch no tv,
rarely ever read any of the books I'm currently reading
(Stephen King's Cell, John Hodgeman's The Areas of My
Expertise, Murray Gell-Mann's The Quark and the Jaguar,
Karl Fulves Self-Working Table Magic), and find myself
just absorbing information rather than doing any work
on the things I need to get done.
RSS feeds have made many aspects of my internet addicted life considerably easier, but this ease has come at the price of now having way too much to possibly read.
As a sidenote, I listen to audio at work most of the day, and have given up radio in favor of podcast audio. After a year or so of this, I've now subscribed to so many awesome things that I could never ever listen to them all. I'm actually giving thought to writing a script to re-encode all the mp3s at a higher speed after they download, thus giving me more "time" to listen to them. (I already watch TV this way. I use MythTV for 100% of my TV viewing, and watch most things at 1.3X normal speed, with commercials automatically being skipped. This makes TV bearable and manageable. I recently tried watching TV in a more traditional manner, and found that I couldn't do it.)
-April 15th, 2006 at 10:03 am
Andrew Says:
unplug your computer for a day. it's relaxing.
April 17th, 2006 at 12:50 pm
GNBenson Says:
Are you mad? I'll be in Japan for two weeks next month with almost no net access. The horror!