Admission of the Problem
I can’t say I hate the internet. Not yet.
Without it, how else would I have known that Rrrebecca posted her thoughts and reactions to an article about the misconceptions of multitasking, titled The Autumn of the Multitaskers? Without the internet, how would I be able to share this interesting idea with you (whoever you are)? Without the internet, why, I wouldn’t be able to check the stats for this blog and analyze the ip addresses of visitors in order to try figure to out where and by whom my response to her response to his article was being read. And wouldn’t that make my life less lived?
Yesterday was the first day of classes for the Spring semester of my sophomore year, here at CSU Chico. That morning I attended an introductory class on basic drawing, and a class on academic writing, just thrilling both. Afterwards I went to work and didn’t get home until after six. First thing I did when I got back, before I took off my bag or pulled the bike helmet off my skull, was boot up my computer. Seven new emails since I checked it that morning!
Sure, half of it was junk or myspace or facebook or some other form of fruitless digital flotsam, but the other half was written by people I respect, people whose opinion of me matters a lot to me, people I want to know more about, and people I relate to. This was the pay dirt, this was the cherished human interaction, this was the substance that made the rest of my time “a life”.
“Get a life.” Such cruelty for a childish figure of speech. As if the recipient of this verbal arrow wasn’t living, but was merely taking up space, only getting in the way, amounting to nothing more than a breathing eating shitting meat-sack. As much satisfaction as I get from waking well rested, eating real food, making my body grow and work, and pursuing other such primal habits, I worry constantly about having a life.
So I make one for myself and I connect it to the internet. A lot of this is driven by my penchant for documentation and publication. If I’ve got “a life”, shouldn’t there be an abundance of evidence? Shouldn’t I share it? Shouldn’t it be digitized and thrown to the commons so that perhaps it can be fuel for someone else’s self-affirming masturbatory internet vanity?
I often find myself wishing more of my friends in Chico were a bit more deft on the internets. I wish more of them had Flickr accounts, or that they blogged more often, so that maybe our online representations could be sewn together just a bit tighter.
And yet I have a compulsive fear of telephones. In “real life”, meatspace, non-virtual reality, I’m much more cloistered. More-so since moving to Chico. In the four hours I spent amongst other students yesterday I talked to maybe two of them, and only in the briefest and most incidental manner. I so quickly cast away chances to relate with these peers of mine because in all honesty, I’m nowhere near as social in the flesh as I am on the net.
Even with well-established friends, people with whom I have a deep, trusting, well-bonded friendship, I find myself being less social than I really ought to be. So I admit I have a problem.
Because the internet offers me the ability to so easily refine and spell-check and fucking twitter my life away and out into the void, I feel much more comfortable expressing myself and seeking that most-valued meaningful human interaction within the bezel of my laptop’s screen. As a result, I feel much less competent in my efforts to meet new people and strike up interesting conversations in real life.
Sure, I can make the case that I don’t have much in common with the majority of my peers at University, and that the long-tailed distance-less form of the internet allows me to connect with people who really get me. But that doesn’t mean I should snub as much face-to-face socialization as I do.
I don’t think I have an internet-addiction in all honesty, and I’m not trying to imply that my life in the real world is as pale in comparison to my online life as night and day, but I do think the balance ought to shift.
I’m going to publish this post, by no means my last, and then I am going to turn off my computer. Today I am going to make breakfast, I am going to ride my bike, I am going to attend classes on things I find interesting like photography and philosophy and human geography, I’m going to go grocery shopping, and I’m going to look people in the eyes and know that my brain can pull so much more information from their body language and the tone of their voice and their appearance than it ever could from an emoticon.