Slashdot Mirror
Broadband Life and Internet Anxiety Disorder
ChipGuy writes "Broadband brings the world right to your laptop or your handheld. With it comes information, and along with it comes desire to stay connected, and on top of everything. Om Malik calls it Internet Anxiety Disorder. 'The rush to catch-up and living a six megabits per second lifestyle, is what I think is going to be first major malaise of the 21st century - Internet anxiety disorder,' he says. Firefox developer, Blake Ross thinks that 'Internet hardwires developing brains with a click-happy sense of urgency that will not defer to reality. We are addicted to information and seek it even when we know it's not available.' Others have described this info-addiction as Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder."
Thing is, there's not much we can do about internet addiction. It's a sobering thought.
I walk in the door and within thirty seconds of hanging up my keys I've logged back into the main machine and flipped open the lid on the iBook, even if I'm only coming home to change clothes and head back out the door in five minutes. If I'm at home or at work, it's exceedingly rare that I go more than an hour without hitting news.google.com, topix.net and slashdot.org. Of course, I generally know what's going on in the world in a pretty timely manner, even if I don't have (or take) the time to learn anything other than headlines and article summaries.
I definitely see the web as a detriment to workplace productivity, but there's no simple solution for those of us who make productive use of the web in our jobs. Of course, by and large slashdot doesn't help in my job (although friends here have pointed me to some valuable technical solutions and resources), and it's the vast majority of the non-essential browsing I do at work. Of course, when I'm truly busy my bullshit web use drops sharply, so I guess that means it's not too strong a compulsion.
Okay, time to stop typing in a browser window and go do some useful stuff on such a beautiful Saturday afternoon.
*wanders off to check the news sites while another cup of coffee brews*
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
Our parents were always heading outside to play baseball, while we stay inside and play Quake, leran about obscure topics, or program something we thought about earlier in the day.
Their parents were always criticizing them for having wild parties and never doing their studies because they're always playing X or Y.
In turn, they criticize our generation for the different lifestyle that we lead.
Simple fact of the matter is that these are different times. If you are a parent worried about your kids' attention spans, find them something to do online that won't 'rot their brains' or 'decrease their attention span'. Teach them to play Bridge or Go or something that is genuinely fun but requires a bit of study and practice. They're very rewarding and at least you won't have to worry that your kid is getting dumber. It's hard to think of someone as less intelligent than they used to be when they can kick your ass at a game like that.
Parents, find a healthier outlet for your anachronisms.
That having been said, I haven't read TFA. They may well be right that attention spans are decreased. All I'm saying is that's not the end of the world.
While I mostly agree with your comments, there are certainly cultures that would be more prone to this overloading than others (namely, industrialized Western society.) "I'm sure hunter-gatherers had the same desire to stay on top of everything in the forest" contains a bit of naive realism - assuming that other cultures view the world the same way ours does. Hunter-gatherers actually have a very easygoing lifestyle, with much less time per day spent laboring or attaining food than in industrialized or agricultural societies! I remember seeing an anthropological video about the Mbuti Pygmies of the Ituri Rain Forest (a present-day foraging people)... the Mbuti had commented that the forest was a sheltering friend or protector, but the outsiders from "modern" society who inhabited other parts of the forest saw it as an enemy, something to be frightened of and cut down. Clearly there is a difference in how these two groups viewed their world. The Mbuti did not have a controlling world view, felt no need to "dominate" or "be on top of things" - these are Western expressions, where we feel the need to control our surroundings and know everything. So while overloading may be nothing new in United States or industrialized Western cultures, please don't assume this is something that is common to the entire world. ;)
The few months after I got my cable modem (all 500K of it), I was totally addicted. Having come from a POTS 1200 baud background on the old Atari 800, this was quite a huge difference.
Soon after, I had a shitload of useless things running in the taskbar (big clock, weather indicator (like I can't look outside once in a while), dl/ul speed indicators, FTP/IRC/etc. - all sorts of crap. All of it designed to give me more information, most of it useless.
And yet...
I couldn't...
Pull...
Away!
At one point I called off work for a week. Then came the girlfriend breakup that I kinda ignored. After a while reality set in and I started to pull back a bit. I'm glad I did - I've known some who didn't in time. One guy I knew back in the early 90's started selling drugs to support his computer habit. None of us geeks even knew he was doing it until he called us from prison. He got 6 years of 'no computer'.
Always wondered how he seemed to be dialed into AOL all the time (before flat rates were in effect)...
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
There have always been people who are addicted to "news". If they don't know "what's happening in the world", or are prevented from accessing their favourite news medium, they actually suffer a sort of panic attack. Some are quite unreasonable about it, such as making everyone else in the house stop talking for the duration of the evening TV news.
I've observed this disorder not only with the internet, but in previous eras when the primary news media were television, radio, and newspapers. I've read about people in the 1800s who got quite upset if they didn't have access to the latest broadsheet. In one form or another, it probably goes back to the era of town criers.
I have a suspicion that it derives from an abnormal compulsion to "take control" over one's environment, and knowing "what's happening" helps provide an enabling comfort zone.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?