Internet holiday

It’s been so refreshing only being online to check email and my must-read blogs (pink is the new blog and boingboing - I’m a recovering gossip addict). I actually started realizing how much of online life is self-referential and self-replicating; if you step outside of it, the actual effect on your life isn’t much.

Take LiveJournal for example. I’m a hardcore LJ addict, and I’ve journalled virtually daily for about four years. Many of my RL (real-life) friends I either met through LJ or got LJ’s because we were friends (if that makes sense) so, especially when I lived in Seattle, many of my offline social events were organized through LJ. But my friends in Seattle are close enough that I’d generally find out about stuff via text message, phone, or email if I didn’t get a chance to check my 250+ friends list that day. In NYC most of my social life is organized through email or phone, so the impetus to check LJ isn’t as extreme as it was.

Anyway, my point is that there are tons and tons of people who don’t use the internet recreationally. A friend of mine was horrified to discover that a fellow computer scientist had never heard of Flickr. “How can he never have heard of it?” he asked incredulously. And you would think that someone in the field would have at least tangentially come into contact with some photo set of friends, a party, a relative, something or other. But no, no Flickr contact at all.

We are incredulous when we hear such a thing because we spend so much of our lives online that it seems impossible to imagine a life lived primarily online. It’s like people who watch TV all day and people who brag about not owning a TV. Somehow the media becomes an enormous part of our lives and we have a personal stake in it.

I enjoyed being offline for such a long time and I think it did me a great deal of good. Using the internet to zone out can be sort of a destructive mechanism. I spent most of today applying for summer jobs, and I realized how hard it is for me to work linearly online: even if I turn on the computer with the goal of Googling something or looking up a reference, before I know it it’s been two hours and I’m only halfway through whatever I set out to do. The nonlinear aspect of the internet is very seductive but it’s also a timekiller.

I’m goaling myself (horrible MS jargon there- sorry) on using the internet less for mindless clicktrancing and more for specific needs. I haven’t even read half of my del.icio.us bookmarks, for example. And I’m going to keep in mind that the internet is an optional activity, and it doesn’t have to take up so much of my time unless I want it to.