This post at Guyism, if you can bare the annoying habit of auto-playing movie trailers, struck me as being a little short.
Their “six signs you spend too much time on the internet” are all well and good, but there are a few missing, and we need to allow some nods to old “signs you spend too much time online” posts from the old days – you know, before Facebook, before free blogs, when a dotcom cost fifty quid and you had to send them a cheque to pay for it.
First, the points Guyism raises. Vis, you speak in Twitter, you speak in the third person, you threw away your TV because everything is online, you know everything before it happens because of the 743 blogs you read daily, you have friends you have never met in person and you have no attention span.
The last one is interesting. Once upon a time, before tabbed browsing (who would have thought that something so simple would be so great?) you had a long attention span. 56k modems were considered fast. As Roy states on the IT Crowd, “you’d be up all night and you’d only see eight women.” Now, if a YouTube video takes more than three seconds to buffer, I give up on it. Bet you do too. The internet hasn’t made us impatient, but broadband certainly has.
What about the compulsion to share our lives with the world? Lots of us do it, and some of us put money and time into a blog that few people read in order to meet this mysterious goal. Fine. But now EVERYONE has to update their Facebook status or Twitter every seven seconds. You want an outlet for your rage, for the amusing thing that happened on the bus this morning, or to make people jealous of how great and interesting your life is? Fine. But status updates which change your status from “is …” to “is …..” just for the sake of updating? No. Statuses from women in labour which tell you exactly how far dialated they are? Stop it. Please. It’s getting daft. Pointless ones too, like “is waiting for a bus” followed by “is on a bus”, finished off with “hey this is the wrong bus”… you get the picture.
How about the consideration that EVERYTHING must be done online, and it’s BETTER if it is? Books are a great example. People pay to download e-books, they pay for things like Kindle so they can read their e-books on the train, and they tell you “oh it’s cool, you can like, annotate it and stuff.” Yes, but I can annotate my actual book with a pencil. Nothing pleases me more than cracking open a second hand book and finding someone’s notes in there, especially if they are unrelated to the content. “I wonder who this person was meeting at 8pm on 12th Dec 1994?” “Oh look, this one is in Japanese!” and so on. I can read a book in the bath, the kitchen, in bed, on a bus or train; if you put me in a room with no electricity and fifty books for two weeks I could read them all day. Your Kindle will run out of battery power eventually, or you’ll drop it in the bath (if I drop my book and desperately want a non-soggy copy I can replace it for six quid; your kindle costs hundreds), or Amazon will take your books back because they shouldn’t have sold you them in the first place.
There’s this hangover from the late 90′s when the height of cool and technological advancement was being able to do something online, in any way, even if it was more inconvenient. Like passport applications. Once upon a time, you used to go to the Post Office, get a form, fill it in, send it off with about a week’s wages and wait for your shiny new permit to other countries. Then they went online. Now you filled in your basic info, and within two weeks, they sent you the exact same application form, with that info typed onto it (spelling mistakes and all). Wow. Seriously. Well done.
Of course, with fixed-price 20Mb ADSL for pennies a month, that sure sign of too much time online – multi-hundred pound phone bills and complaints from your relatives and friends that they only ever get the engaged tone – is long gone, but then, who really rings eachother any more? We text, we email (or more likely send FB messages), we IM. (I am still old enough to refer to it as IM’ing instead of the generic “kids-of-today” referral to any online chat as MSN. I’ve still got a six-digit ICQ number, for fuck sake, if only I could remember it.) Then along came Skype. “Wow, it’s great, you can make phone calls on the internet for free.” Perfect! But of course, unless you want to expend money on expensive Skype phones with their inbuilt router, you and the person you want to talk to will both have to be online at the same time, at your computer. So you’ll probably text them and say “come on Skype” just so you can have a fifty-second conversation about what’s for dinner tonight. That you could have done in a couple of text messages. For free, as part of your minutes. But instead, you used electricity and bandwidth AS WELL as the texts. Foolish boy.
Can we spend too much time online though? Do you start to get upset if you can’t pick up a wifi signal for ten minutes? Do you base your nights out around bars and pubs where you get a good signal on your phone? Do you get twitchy if you haven’t checked email for five minutes, even though it’ll just be full of FB notifications?
These are the real signs you spend too much time online. Everything else is nonsense.
Tags: 4oD, Amazon, Books, Facebook, IM, Internet, iPlayer, Kindle, MSN, TV, Twitter
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