The Internet: Crack for the 21st Century (Part I)

Need proof? I am beginning to write this at 6am. Now this might not seem noteworthy to those who routinely begin their day at this hour, but I haven’t gone to bed yet. Working at a video store certainly doesn’t help. When I close (which I do often) I don’t get home until about 1am. I typically haven’t eaten dinner yet, since my shift starts around 5 or 6pm. My nightly unwinding need is a bit longer than others, as I rarely fall asleep immediately, though I shouldn’t really have to. If the average American gets home from work around 6pm, I imagine he or she is up for at least another 5-6 hours. Basically, my brain and body are on schedule, it’s just a bad schedule that begins when that of others has ended. And unfortunately there isn’t much cause to fix it, at least not now. I’ve tried to get up daily at a reasonable hour, but what’s the point? If I get up at 9am, have breakfast, shower, etc… now what? I don’t have to be at work for 8 hours! I can fill the gap by watching the thousands of free movies at my disposal (Who needs health insurance when I have this perk?). Or I can return to the good old internet which has in my view claimed the term “idiot box” from the television, though for some reason people are reluctant to admit this fact.

Homer Simpson circa 2002, “The internet! That thing’s still around?”

Honestly, aside from work how often do people use the internet for anything productive? It’s certainly more convenient to make travel arrangements and purchase flight than it was 15 years ago. Paying bills is easier, although most people consider this work anyway and I’m personally tired of the question “Want to go green?” That’s about it though. All the information in the world is stored in this ugly off-color rectangle that doesn’t go with anything in your living room. The internet is basically your drug of choice (as opposed to coffee, alcohol, or cocaine). Like a casino it never closes and possesses the power to stimulate the mind all night long. At 5:30 this morning, T sluggishly walked out from the bed room, saw me staring at the computer screen with the lights on and simply asked “Really?” And this from someone who recently created an impossible-to-remember facebook code for herself because she was spending entirely too much time on it. The net affects us all, and not necessarily for the better. I wonder how often the average person goes out for a walk anymore. I’d bet anything it’s less than 20 years ago, despite an entire industry now designed around advertising weight-loss programs, which pop up almost as frequently as adds to meet singles in “your” area.

The problem with the internet is it’s an addiction for adults. Kids routinely seem no more or less interested in it than they are with older addictions like video games and TV. But the truth is one can only engage in those activities for so long before tiring of them. Even when I was young (8 or 9) and stayed up for hours upon hours trying to beat Contra or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for NES, at some point I needed a break. How many times can anyone beat the same adventure game before needing a new activity? Not even I can stay glued to the couch for more than a single movie at a time. T and I cancelled cable 8 months ago now, a feat that stunned a good friend of mine who firmly believed I’d give up food before cable. As the meat of winter approaches and we begin to get a little stir-crazy we may turn it back on, though we’ve been generally ok with our decision. But neither of us can fathom cancelling the internet and not just because it’s impractical. We’d go insane, a relative term given the hour of my blogging.

I mentioned briefly the value of the ‘net’ for those who depend on it, namely students and adults who need it for work (though this group is a lot smaller than you think). The 1st group that pops into anyone’s head regarding adults who use the internet are office workers, who tend to use document files and excel spreadsheets for anything productive (both existed before and lack a dependence on the net). I laugh at the fact that every time we see Creed on “The Office” he’s playing snood, but just how far from reality is that? Another good friend of mine once had his computer confiscated at work because he wasn’t being productive.

It is true that many use the internet for research, but while certainly more convenient, it is a little sad that libraries (and books by the way) are becoming more and more obsolete. Anything you could ever want or need to read is available online, a killer of thousands of jobs and entire professions. Even a newspaper as reputable as The Boston Globe could fold, dashing the dreams of thousands of young writers who’d prefer to write in that type of atmosphere. There’s also something unnatural about having one’s morning coffee while banging away on your laptop as opposed to having a hard paper to highlight the day’s news. I don’t like it and I feel really bad for anyone above a certain age who’s worked a certain way their entire life and suddenly has to find a job doing work online because their specific line-of-work no longer exists.

And then there’s email, the single most widely used advent of the internet. Email will never leave. It’d be like eliminating cell-phones at this point. We want to reach people easier and faster, for important and irrelevant matters alike. Could there me a more impersonal way of communicating with people? At least we can keep tabs on that guy from our freshman dorm in college, who was sort of a friend/acquaintance. If we didn’t have email how would we find out what he does for work or if he still keeps in touch with that other random acquaintance? I will say this for email though; it does save us the awkward phone transitions when it’s clear to both parties that a conversation is over but neither knows how to sign off. All of a sudden you get an abundance of unnatural pauses and your usage of the word “anyway” increases by a multiple of five.

I suppose it’s a pretty futile exercise to bash the internet in 2010. My grandkids will some day laugh at me for being one of the remaining few thousand people on the planet who once had to write school papers by hand. I’ll have to explain to them what a post-office is, what the letters VCR stand for, and how my home internet connection could be interrupted by someone using the phone. They’ll turn to their siblings and roll they eyes, as if I’m the old man from “Up.” Nope, I’ve got to pick my battles. I’m sure if I think long and hard I can come up with several positive uses of the internet. Only then will I be able to unlock the mystery of how I spend all these insomniac hours.

Stay tuned for Part II.