A member of Anonymous, barred from the Web, talks about life without the Internet for one year.
It reminds me of attending an AA testimony — he’s healthier, he’s a better person, and you can’t help noticing there’s a part of him that misses it.
Also, I read it online and found that towards the bottom of this whopping 8 paragraphs I was looking forward to clicking something else.
Excellent article! It reminded me of thoughts I had after I spent two months in the Amazon Rainforest without electricity and therefore Internet. Sadly, I got sucked right back in, but it’s important to remind ourselves of the that Internetless perspective.
My favorite line:
“For it is our attention spans that have suffered the most. Our lives are compressed into short, advertisement-like bursts or “tweets”. The constant stream of drivel fills page after page, eating away at our creativity. If hashtags were rice grains, do you know how many starving families we could feed? Neither do I – I can’t Google it.”
This was an interesting idea to consider, but I ironically found my attention drifting somewhere around “diminished attention span.”
Though I’m technically a child of the digital age, I didn’t have a Facebook account until I was 18 years old (thank god), so I do know of life before the Internet, and I did have a “childhood” beyond the digital walls of my AIM chat room. I understand and appreciate the value of disconnecting every once in a while, but I find it ridiculous to ascribe to the ideology that life is “more fulfilled” without the Internet. The world has developed to absorb the benefits (and consequences) of connectivity, but that doesn’t mean I need to be banned from the Internet to realize the value of going for a walk on a sunny day. Or to understand that Facebook “likes” do not translate into food for impoverished children.