Thanks, Al Gore

I’ve been out of life-commission for about two weeks now. I should be able to blame this on the fact that I was juggling grad school finals and a 50-hour work-week; pathetically, however, I cannot. In order to displace the blame from myself, though, there is only one other entity for me to point a finger at: the Internet. Last week, I described Facebook to someone as a black hole of integrity; however, the Internet itself – the whole World Wide Web – is even worse than just FB. I say this because for me the Internet has become a black hole of not just integrity, but also time, real life conversations, fresh air, and hobbies. In fact, I am beginning to think that this fandangled Internet may be doing my life way more bad than good.


Zack has already commented on how the Internet has the ability to bring out his inner-creepster, and from the comments people left and from mine and my friends’ experiences, I am positive he is not alone. For each hour that I am at my computer supposed to be doing something productive (which is often because I’m a grad student and a teacher), you can bet that I spend at least twenty minutes being a creepster, perusing unimportant vice-sites, or living in the past via online pictures of myself and friends. The list of most-visited sites that drops down when I begin to type “www.” into my location bar is a shame, and the ridiculous number of social networking sites I’m a member of is an embarrassment. I have my homepage set to the news, and I feel like poseur each time I see it. Because of the Internet, I know more information about celebrities and acquaintances than is sometimes comfortable. In fact, although it may still be a long ways away, I am crossing my fingers that soon our generation makes the transition into it being socially acceptable to say, “Oh, I know that your second cousin’s brother goes to my alma mater because I stumbled across him following link after link from your profile – anyway, does he like it there?”

What’s worse than the Internet turning us into creepsters, though, is the culture of instant gratification and impatience that it fosters. The Internet is training us to live in a mind-frame of “what I want right now, I can have right now.” When I want to buy something, I can be purchasing it in the time it takes me to whip out my credit card. If I think of something I meant to tell someone, I can type it out and have my message in their inbox within minutes. Furthermore, as a person who is pretty impatient already, I feel like the Internet is making this personality trait even worse, or otherwise giving me ADD. Hardly a day goes by when I don’t have a thought like: Why isn’t my Blockbuster movie here, yet – I sent my other one back two days ago? Why hasn’t he responded to my email – I sent it like thirty minutes ago? And never can I sit down to do research without opening up five other tabs to do Google and/or Wikipedia searches of whatever pops into my head.

Today, I feel like I literally depend on the Internet – for communicating, for news, for being so Nuevo Gay, and for knowing the general interests and favorite music of anyone I have a conversation with. In fact, the two times in the past three years when I lived in Internetless apartments, my roommates and I would essentially balance on one toe while holding our computers inside the microwave if that’s what it took to pick up a nearby wireless signal. However, after my pathetic and unproductive past two weeks, I’ve been thinking that one day soon I may try to quit the Internet for a substantial amount of time. Sure, maybe I’ll get fired, lose any Ohio friends I have left, forget to wish some good friends happy birthday, and probably run up a $500 cell phone bill by replacing Gchat with texting, but it will reassure me that humanity does not equal technology.