It’s now 2011, which means that the Internet has been a part of your daily existence for at least twelve years, give or take a few, which is plenty of time for it to have rewired your brain, your soul, and your vision in both subtle and obvious ways. For a long time, the conversation about the Internet that takes place on the Internet has focussed on whether these changes are beneficial or not; but lately there’s been a shift toward discussing how these changes make you feel. The answer is: bad. A blog post at Thought Catalog by one Leigh Alexander lists five emotions invented by the Internet:
*A vague and gnawing pang of anxiety centered around an IM window that has lulled.
*A sudden and irrational rage in response to reading an ‘@-reply’ on Twitter.
*The state of being ‘installed’ at a computer or laptop for an extended period of time without purpose, characterized by a blurry, formless anxiety undercut with something hard like desperation.
*The car collision of appetite and discomfort one feels simultaneously when using the internet to seek and consume images or information that may be considered unseemly or inappropriate.
*The sense of fatigue and disconnect one experiences after emitting a massive stream of content only to hit some kind of ‘wall’ and forget and/or abandon the entire thing.
Yes, you feel bad, in each and all of these five ways. You are suffering from a surfeit of Internet, and you wish that you could simply simplify, simply stop when you’ve reached the saturation point, simply turn off. But you can’t. Why can’t you? It isn’t because the Internet is addictive. It’s because excess is addictive. Excess, you see, has been part of your daily existence for at least your entire life (unless you are part of the 12.8% of Americans over the age of sixty-five, who feasibly experienced a simple, vigorous, TV- and Wal-Martless existence during their formative years), and the Internet is just the most recent mechanism by which you indulge. The Internet provides fatty, sugary donuts of information, perhaps as harmful as the dozen chocolate-glazed-with-sprinkles you get at the corner Dunkin’. America runs on… and on…. and on… and doesn’t stop. So what do you do? You begin by reading this book
which addresses the “democratization of temptation” in our society, a movement which, by promoting bad habits like smoking, eating poorly, lethargy, overdrinking, and oversexing, leads to more than a million deaths in the U.S. each year. As a people, Akst writes, “we’re embarked on a campaign of slow-motion suicide.” And it isn’t just untimely death that’s a problem; it’s the quality of our lives. Emotional and psychological problems sprout freely in the soil of excess: depression, social anxieties, anorexia nervosa, unhappiness in relationships.
In short, we hold nothing in higher esteem than freedom, but we are woefully bad at being free.
There is power in naming the problem, and this is part of what makes Akst’s book good. He lays it all out—all the many ways in which the modern matrix acts upon our psyches to our physical and emotional detriment. But the book is also good because it is positive, dedicated to seeking solutions. Many of these are historical—the Greeks suffered similar problems, and they thought about these problems deeply: What is free will?, they asked themselves. And how does the free individual embrace self-discipline? Later philosophers, modern scientists, religious thinkers, and great novelists weigh in on these questions, too, and the result is not so much a self-help book as a collection of informed viewpoints.
Ultimately, Akst writes, there is hope—if our technologies got us into this mess, mightn’t they also have the power to get us out? Well, even if our technology can’t save us (I am skeptical that the ever-spinning wheels of the donut factory will ever start churning out organic broccoli), we really can always save ourselves. For example, though I used to suffer greatly from the five bad Internet emotions listed above, I am now better at controlling my experience, and as often as not I have happy Internet emotions. If I were to make a list of five, they might be:
*A satisfaction from having read through the carefully cultivated list of Web sites you visit daily, which keep you informed and awaken you to astonishing things worth knowing, and which you never would have known without the Internet.
*An appreciation of your ability to discipline yourself, which is strengthened every time you limit your Internet usage to meaningful content and activities.
*A feeling of amazement that there is so much good writing and design in the world, much of which happens to be available on the Internet, plus a general amazement at human inventiveness.
*A joy from being able to view pictures, watch videos, Skype, G-chat, Tweet, etc., with your people.
*A happiness that comes from being able to be inventive yourself—to create on a whim a beautiful Tumblr or to participate in a discussion on an interesting topic with other like-minded readers.
The five bad emotions will undoubtedly continue to exist (in my life as in any Internet user’s), but, as Akst writes in the final paragraph of his book, “Let’s look on the bright side. That self-control is the biggest problem faced by many of the world’s people is a blessing in not much of a disguise. Self-regulation will always be a problem, but if somebody’s going to be in charge, it might as well be me.”