Why I dislike the internet
(it's not a real skeleton, it's a sculpture)
Several of my friends tell me how great Facebook is because you can "keep in touch" with peripheral friends without actually having to contact them: you just have to log on and read their latest updates, and presto, you're living in the moment again! But I ask: what ideal does this feed? You turn your life into a TV channel, and you distance yourself from the spectators. We all know how much bad TV there is out there. Shall our lives undergo the same scrutiny, by those friends that are not close enough for us to make out their faces?
The practicality of spectating others' lives like this, feeds our thirst for social networking, without actually having a practical application. Thus it isn't keeping in touch, but merely a selfish action, and a self-deception at that, as we feel a false sense of accomplishment.
And still I keep coming back to the internet in my free time. Because back in the day, I used to successfully sate my thirst for social input on the internet. I can no longer do that, but neither can I sate it in other ways as easily as I'd like to. So when my day is incomplete, I turn to the internet. But what do I find there, today?
I find message boards, and I find Facebook and Twitter. Cold walls of self-deception, and I know there is no real interaction in it. Even so, while there is something new, I am satisfied, and I keep eating. But as soon as I realize that the new things are gone and that I did nothing more than write new letters on the cold walls, I find I am hungrier than ever. I become lonely, and I search harder. My mood falters, and I start just mindlessly flicking through all bookmarked sources of deception, looking for signs of life to devour fruitlessly. deviantART can keep me going for a while, but after a while even that is old, but then it's too late, and I am caught in the same old oblivion. Stopping would signalize giving up, and comes with a disappointment, so I always postpone it.
The only good thing I can spend my time doing, during the long stretches where no mentionworthy IM conversations can be had, is to put together some sort of text, like this entry, or upload a photo on deviantART. However, that is also a source of disappointment, because most of the things I write are never read, and the creator alone can never give anything meaning.
All in all, whatever I do, the internet drains more attention and energy from me than it gives me back. It is an investment that doesn't pay off, a superfluous expense, but in today's society, one it is hard to rid oneself of.