The internet is off at home, due to nonpayment, but I keep instinctively trying to click on Tweetdeck or Firefox to look something up. It reminds me of how much I rely on the internet for information, for soothing escape from loneliness, to waste time. It’s lonely here in . . . → Read More: Internet Down]]>

photo credit kirk lau http://www.flickr.com/photos/kirklau/

The internet is off at home, due to nonpayment, but I keep instinctively trying to click on Tweetdeck or Firefox to look something up. It reminds me of how much I rely on the internet for information, for soothing escape from loneliness, to waste time. It’s lonely here in the morning without the internet. I am considering not turning it back on. I will miss streaming Netflix, but everything else I can do with my phone or at a local coffeeshop. Not having internet at home won’t kill me, and, who knows, it might make me a tad more productive. I’d probably get the house cleaned up, if nothing else.

I certainly have a love/hate relationship with the web. I’ll be the first to defend Twitter and Facebook, and have students email me rather than talk to them in class, and I love Youtube as a resource, and my blog and those of others have been great sources of connection, comfort and insight, but I will also waste an entire morning watching Funny or Die, or Jon Stewart videos, when I know I have other things to do and precious little time. I need to find a workable internet regime. Whether that means relegating it to certain times of day, or turning if off completely, or having to go to specific places to access it, I have to build a structure that mitigates my attention flitting tendencies. In fact, I’ve been going to the Hatcher Grad library at U of Michigan to do work precisely because I cannot access their internet.

I went on a meditation retreat a few years ago, where I did nothing but sit silently. No writing, no talking, nothing, and when I turned my phone on after a week and a half, and got back to the internet, I found that I had not really missed anything earth-shatteringly important. The world continued on, people still had breakfast, and T’d G it was F, and suffered loneliness, and shared links, and posted pics, and I was fine and they were fine without me. Point is, I don’t need to check Facebook 40 times a day, and neither do you.

We’ve all heard this before, from friends and colleagues, and several times on this blog. Moderation is the key, as it is in most everything in life, but it is so easy to lose sight of that, to get dragged back into the muck of everyone else’s everyday experience, to fear that you will miss something if you don’t keep checking. I feel like the end of The Social Network, where he is clicking and clicking, waiting for a response, except that instead of waiting for a particular response to a specific request from one desired individual, we are waiting for…what? I don’t know, but we keep getting pieces of it, tiny fragments that promise to show more, or to stand in for something we really do miss in our lives. To call it connection is to trivialize it, and risks setting up the tired old dichotomy of “real” (or f2f) connection and the “fake” connection of social networking sites like Facebook. No, online connections are very real, even if different, but, being asynchronous, they can usually wait.