If I hear a newscaster talk about their Twitter account or break some news about a senator posting a Twitter post (I refuse to use the word "tweet," or to make it a verb) I will strangle myself with the nearest wire. Which would be my iPod charger. Which wouldn’t be long enough to do anything other than irritate me further.
Sometimes I realize that my job wouldn’t exist if it were not for the Internet. This frightens me. I would like to think that if I decided to go on a wilderness retreat, or if I were kidnapped by Bear Grylls, I could continue to make ends meet by taking a pen to paper, or juniper berry to bark. But that’s not the case. The only way I’ve ever made money as a writer was through the ether of the Internet. Which is scary when you think about it, kind of like looking at the vastness of space, only with some guy tapping you on the shoulder and trying to sell you porn, medication, and watches occasionally. But it’s also inspiring, I guess. It means that there’s some semblance of job security, so long as there’s not a really long power outage or the dog mistakes my wireless router for a waffle.
I like the Internet. I like it, the way that I like television, or baths. It’s great, it makes my life better, I’m not exactly comfortable labeling it a necessity, but I sure don’t want to live without it either. I’m not a troglodyte like some of my relatives who would think I made up the word "blog" to be funny, but I’m also not one of those addicts who needs to broadcast their location via a social network every two minutes. This is less a criticism of those who use those outlets, and more a declaration of my self-perception. Nobody cares that I went to the store this afternoon ’cause I ran out of single-ply toilet paper. Nobody gives a shit that my breath smells like Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Nobody cares that Ainsley is: sad, with a touch of cramps. Really, there are very few people who have ever cared that much about the minutiae of my life, and the majority of those who do care aren’t skilled with computers. Take my mom, for example. Up until the week she died she printed out this blog to read it. She also printed out emails. God only knows that if I’d turned her on to Twitter an entire South American rain forest would have been leveled to supply her with the reams.
Sometimes I just want to turn off the computer or delete every account I have. To some people this sounds like a cry for help, the equivalent of cavalierly saying, "Oh, sometimes I just want to jump and see what would happen," when standing by an open window on the 36th floor. But it’s hard for me not to feel overwhelmed by the quantity of information that’s available, and it becomes increasingly difficult to prioritize and filter out the nonsense when I sit down to do something. (I’ve heard there are people who are very good at giving advice about this, Mr. Mann is one of them.)
When I was a kid and I started writing poetry, I made sure to tell my mother to leave me alone. I’d turn off my radio, close my door, jam a chair in front of it, and sit at my desk in front of my notebook. Extreme measures? Sure. But it helped me to focus. I wouldn’t allow myself to read the latest issue of Death, I wouldn’t practice bass guitar, I wouldn’t daydream about Trent Reznor and I in his tour bus, I’d write. And that forced isolation in a distraction-free environment made me productive and taught me discipline. These days, it may look like I’m sitting at my computer in a silent kitchen, with nobody around except for a mellow, obese Pomeranian, but I am actually sitting in front of a 10.2" fracas that renders me more forgetful than a sixty-year-old hippie in a smoke circle. Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and Google Reader are evils from the Pandora’s box of procrastination, and what’s worse, their seduction is nearly impossible to resist.
For example, I get a lot of great ideas from the blogs I follow on Tumblr. I find links to international design sites, obscure news stories, and personal accounts about events that are foreign to me. These are inspirational and helpful, but in order to find them I have to sift through countless, often quite funny, posts about sex, small animals, Kanye, or other Tumbl-logs or whatever they’re called. Those don’t help productivity, though they sure boost morale. Same goes for Twitter, which more often than not is the kindling for some good humor writing, but the amount of posts I read to get there is time consuming. Google Reader helps me to feel halfway intelligent, but there are many, many posts that clog my eye-holes about hybridized zebras, ways to tie up your lover, or the golden years of Kathleen Hanna. I love all of these sites most days, but they inevitably take away from my work in a certain respect because of the amount of time they require. And I’m not even talking about my own updates on all of them. There goes another two hours.
If it sounds like I’m miffed, I’m not. I’m just frustrated that I can’t go back to the good old days of pen and paper, where a shut door was the equivalent of a sensory deprivation tank. It’s not as if I don’t turn in work on deadline, or that the corner of the Internet that I frequent actually gets in the way of getting things done, it’s just that these sites create enormous speed-bumps of distraction along the way. Sometimes I’m just bombarded by the influx of cyber-noise, I wish I could turn it off in order to put my nose to the grindstone, but that’s when I realize, without the Internet, I’m pretty much relegated to teenage poetry and silence.
{ 3 comments }
Ainsley – well said – I hate the new made-up words.
Regarding speed-bumps affecting getting paid – my grandfather was a small farmer and he loved the days of heavy rain – nothing to do but sit by the open fire waiting for the rain to stop – maybe we’re programmed for rest? Turn off the noise and sit by the fire rather than the grindstone. It’s what he did.
This is why I’ve slowed down on all of those subscriptions.
There has a to be a medium,some restraint. Otherwise its the excess of information seems (to me) to transform into ignorant bliss, and what is learned becomes the minority.
Glad you struggle with it too. Love.
I just wanted to call out how great your writing skills are