tooth soup

So, the internet.

It’s undeniable that the internet has well and truly weaved its way through everyday life. As a kid I was endlessly fascinated with its possibilities. To me, the internet was the digital equivalent of a Christmas present; a space of infinite potential waiting patiently to be unwrapped and laid bare before expectant eyes. There was magic to be found in there. There was knowledge to be imparted. There were Mortal Kombat ‘fatality’ button combinations to be downloaded. It was, essentially, the most exciting way to utterly waste a childhood. Fortunately, my mother wouldn’t let/couldn’t afford us kids achieving such waste. So it wasn’t until my early teens that I managed to get a foot in the door by way of a free half-hour-per-day internet service and a modem cord that strung a garrote across the hallway, warning people with an urgent post-it that ‘MODEM IN USE! DON’T PICK UP PHONE’. The service itself was intended to provide a strict half an hour per day of free internet access, limited to popular sites such as Yahoo mail, and sponsored sites. However, I discovered that if you started downloading something large (and this is back in the 56K days, so ‘large’ was defined as anything larger than about 10Mb) before the half-hour was up, you could keep the timer going. I also discovered that if you sent yourself a link in your Yahoo email and clicked it through there, then you could escape the confines of the allowed sites.

I was 13 years old. You can guess the kinds of sites I went to. But let’s skip over that bit and get to today. It was only meant to provide a human introduction anyway.

Today I am well and truly addicted to the internet. It still holds that limitless, infinite quality that makes a very small part of me, way down the dusty back corner of my brain, think ‘Christmas!’, but when that browser window opens, the waveform collapses and I end up mindlessly refreshing three or four sites to see if anyone’s posted a new message to me in the last 6.30 seconds. I realised, with surprising clarity for an addict, how incredibly sad this was a couple of months ago*. Realisation, I’ve heard, is the first step in recovery. You’ve got to admit you have a problem before you can fix it. So, knowing myself better than anybody else, I decided to start cutting back on the internet.

Now, that’s a pretty simple statement for what it’s suggesting. If you’re not taking this seriously, then feel free to replace ‘internet’ with ‘crack’ or ‘ice’, because I can tell you that it’s that fucking hard. It is a habit. Not nearly as dangerous as something that involves sticking a needle into your arm, but a habit nonetheless. It requires a conscious effort of will to modify your behaviour in a direction that it isn’t used to. It’s not a trivial thing. Here’s some things I learned in the first few weeks:

1. If you’re finished with your computer, turn it off. Shut it down. Don’t let it idle, because it will entrap you again sooner rather than later. If that doesn’t work, try unplugging your mouse and keyboard. Laziness will ultimately win out.
2. Try and set times for yourself to use the ‘net. This is impossible if you use the internet for work, but if you don’t, limit yourself to once in the morning and once in the afternoon.
3. Use Microsoft Outlook or a similar email client to schedule checks for your emails. That way you won’t be distracted by loading up a web browser that can be used to go to other sites.
4. Stay the fuck out of chat rooms. Delete MSN messenger. Chats will suck your hours away more effectively than any other web element. Moreover, they are the emptiest form of communication available. There is no permanent record of your interactions (unless you count bash.org and its associates), so throw-away comments and unfounded arguments are rife, drama queens are common to the point of being epidemic, and any intelligent discussion will be broken up with an out-of-date meme.

The fact that I’m posting this blog means that I failed at leaving the internet. In fact I bought into the internet, purchasing this domain and enough web space and transfer limit to host a small pr0n site. So what gives? Well, like I said way back up at the start of this post, the internet has well and truly weaved its way into everyday life. I’m a PhD student who uses the internet to access his work, so it’s impossible for me to escape it. Simple as that. But so far this rant has focused mainly on the negative aspects of internet addiction, and correspondingly, the internet itself. It’s true that there are a lot of sites out there whose only purpose is to harvest your time to feed to the giant shapeless organic forms that power their servers. But there is also a great wealth of knowledge to be found, and a great amount of creativity to behold. These special places exist mainly away from the larger communities (such as deviantART, and I’ll be writing a cautionary tale about that soon enough) and are found in the rare, honest places that offer wisdom for little or no reward. Intelligent insight, or well-reasoned comments on the state of the world are common in these places. Ways of looking at the planet we live on in new and genuine angles, or an interactive experiment in creativity. These are the ways in which the internet can be used for good, rather than idleness.

Accordingly, it’s my intention to use this domain and this blog to discuss things that I find intellectually stimulating, and in doing so hopefully convert my wasted hours into something beneficial. I want to use the internet to improve my intranet, if I can use such a horrible turn of phrase and not lose people to groans. Not a withdrawal from the ‘net, but a redirection (these puns are getting awful). Eventually I want to turn this space into a haven for graphic novelists to display their work for free, and receive micro donations for them, but before I do that, I’m going to have to learn some code. If any code monkeys read this and know where I can get started towards such a thing (I’m going to make the interface in flash, but the whole donation thing and preventing people from downloading them will be way past anything I’ve done) then please let me know.

Alright, that’s enough for now. Time to go finish off Nabokov. Motherfucker just won’t stop kicking.

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*Come to think of it, the realisation probably came to me earlier in the year. I was playing three to four hours of Counter Strike: Source a night, and checking all these sites in between games. I quit cold turkey from that sometime in March and haven’t gone back since.

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