The Interweb

I love the Internet. I can't imagine life without it. It has made my research so much easier, it has connected me to so many people, and it has answered so many useless trivia questions. Seriously, how did people figure things out, like, what was Battle Cat's alter ego? (it was Cringer) 

Like many, I'm on Facebook, I rss favourite sites, music and movies flow freely, I email, I instant message, I organize my life through my computer and the Internet. It has definitely lead to enormous benefits in my day-to-day life and massive potential, still yet to be tapped. 

But there is another side to all of this. Nothing quite like the Internet has the power to distract, the ability to to keep us perpetually inattentive to what is going on around us and in front of us. I really noticed this the other day when a buddy sent me a link to check out a video of Mr. Thomas Earl Petty doing a fantastic Super Bowl concert. After I enjoyed this, I noticed a video entitled "worst half time video ever' and watched that. It was pretty funny. Then I noticed 'worst price is right contestant ever' and so it went. I spent a good half hour watching this tripe. The time just disappeared. 

Don't get me wrong, the videos were pretty funny. I even lol'd a couple times. But what difference does it make, ultimately? It was so quick and cheap and unsatisfying to get laughs from shitty quality videos that are sub-2 minutes and completely unrelated to anything of importance. It's a kind of instant gratification of a need or impulse that never existed in the first place. This same sensation is called up when I realize that I've been pissing around on the web for an hour with little recall of what I was meant to be doing or looking for in the first place. In these instances, I feel like the Internet is using me, and not the other way around. 

What does this do to our attention span? To our ability to take things in at a slower, and what I would call, a more human pace? What does it do to our ability to connect to information, to media (and I use this in the broadest of terms) in the, so-called, "real world," that unfold slowly and where meaning is built with time, and patience, and thought?