I sit down, like every other day, convinced that I will be productive. I pop my laptop on, organize my work space, write a mental list of everything that needs doing, and yet I am still in the same position I had been 2 hours previous. In fact, this happens so often that I forget this is not an ideal situation and merely accept that the internet will distract me.
Facebook, email, IM services, youtube – no matter what it is, the Internet has a vice like quality that will rip you from your most important work and leave you in a constant state of distraction. There may be some who argue these distractions will help ease your stress – that to work productively you first must feel comforted. Why do we take the Internet as a comforting place to be, and more importantly, why do we feel we should run our lives by it and, more often than not, through it?
The internet delivers a universe of information right to our desks and despite this I see many, including myself, wasting this opportunity away on seemingly pointless websites. But are they really pointless? Facebook, for instance, keeps people connected with one another – it enables cross country friends and family to stay up to date with the latest news on Little Joey and his baseball team, on Susie and her new school year and with plans for reunions and family events. This is an excellent way of combining busy schedules with the need to keep one another in the loop. However, facebook is not all that simple. Watching people in lecture halls, I witness many, many people logging onto facebook to check on their messages, and then begin to “creep” one another for the entirety of the lecture time. Infact, even as I write this, I have facebook open on my browser. Part of me could justify this – ‘it was open so I could write this article’, but the better part of me knows that this is not true. It is open because, like many people, we are trapped into a constant cycle of reload. Why are we so afraid that something new may have happened in the past 20 seconds that we haven’t noticed or seen yet? Are a few hours or days, even, going to affect the way that we live? Instead of facebooking one another, why not pick up the phone, or even meet face to face for coffee (or your poison of choice)?
This brings me to my next qualm. Are websites like Facebook removing our humanity? I bet you’re thinking ‘Woah, slow down there. It’s just a website’. Is it just a website, though? When we spend countless hours browsing through pages of our friends, and their friends, and sometimes even their friends; when we send one another digital “gifts” to wish a Happy Birthday, or to express our gratitude or sadness; when we post messages on each other’s “walls” instead of talking to one another – all of these point to a lack of togetherness. We are together, but apart – wound around one another by invisible walls of energy and copper wires.
The internet may be an area of relative democracy, but I grow increasingly worried about our dependency on websites like Facebook, and what it might be distracting us from, and the affect it may have on person to person interaction in years to come.
. I find it extremely comforting to feel the ache in my legs and the knots on my shoulders because it means I gave my all. I worked as hard as I possibly could and my body is absolute proof of this.
