Disconnect

[Guido]

I don't know whether it's my brittle identity or my predisposition to become heavily addicted to anything that causes my internet use to make me quite anxious and consider other entities on the internet as superior to me in regard to certain talents and activities, but I'm certain it's not healthy to spend all your free time refreshing the same websites over and over again in search for incentives and novelties that kindle your interest to some degree. I know that, at least in theory, some people are able to restrict their time spent on the internet to the practical minimum, but to be honest I mostly hang out with people who would be far more creative and happy when they wouldn't immerse themselves this much in this dreadful realm that at times probably requires no more brain activity than sleeping.

I'm aware that I can only assess the changes that full-time internet usage imposed on my own life, yet I reckon that many of us forum dwellers and news junkies alike would be better off doing other things, regardless what those things are.

I switched off my computer for a couple of days and spent my time reading a book and thinking about things without being influenced by whatever is currently hot among my Facebook friends and feeling MUCH calmer.

I'm sure there are plenty of you who are able to handle the internet without being affected by its long-term side effects but all I want to do its provoke you some thoughts pertaining to internet use and addiction.

And a special remark about Facebook: I emptied my wall and I will probably remove all my friends or deactivate/remove my account soon. Although a completely interconnected world where everyone is able to share their thoughts, feelings and locations in an instant would have been heralded as an ideal luxury by archaic science fiction writers, in reality it actually deprives the fun of connecting socially and breaks it down to its bare, practical bones. After some days without Facebook, my mind has been cleansed of a lot of things I just don't need to know. Facebook and the internet as a whole cause a massive sensory overload to people who are sensitive to it like me and you will notice you will be able to absorb (relevant) information much easier when you disconnect for a while.

I'm aware that these kind of ideas circulate already, especially in certain scenes, but I've know experienced first-hand that the internet in fact deprives you of a lot of energy and fun. I just want to provoke a discussion regarding this.

[Julian Candy]

tl;dr

Just kidding.

[Pantheon]

I have mentioned before that I suffer from servere social Anxiety and depression, but on that note, things have actualy been getting so much better recently. The point I want to make is that a while ago most of my contact with other people was through the web, and I honnestly belive that without it I would have been a lot worse off, a lot. Chatting with some of the boc folk on this forum and especial Dono and Geodesic realy helped me threw some stuff, more than they would know.
I also was addicted to Unreal Tournament 2007, and reguarly joined a group of gamers on teamspeak. In a simmilar way, just being able to relax and chat with these people I hadnt met in the flesh helped me sort out my confused mind a hell of a lot. I just want to point out that I wasnt a fat nerd during these times, lol, I got almost too much excercise, as it was the only other thing I enjoyed doing.

I can see the apeal of disconnecting yourself from this mass interconnection of almost infinite depth, at times it seems to me like something that can be very evil to the soul of a person. Like you say, it has the tendency to robotise all of your experiences, and repeatedly suck you back in with its instant access to virtual anything you want.

I dont realy have a defining point, as in my mind, the internet can both heal a persons soul and with the other hand, take it away from them.

[Waterbagel]

in reality it actually deprives the fun of connecting socially and breaks it down to its bare, practical bones

in reality it actually deprives the fun of connecting socially and breaks it down to its bare, practical bones

in reality it actually deprives the fun of connecting socially and breaks it down to its bare, practical bones

in reality it actually deprives the fun of connecting socially and breaks it down to its bare, practical bones

in reality it actually deprives the fun of connecting socially and breaks it down to its bare, practical bones

in reality it actually deprives the fun of connecting socially and breaks it down to its bare, practical bones

[turquoise70]

the only reason that i haven't already deleted my facebook account (and I mean really deleted, not deactivated) is because the old faceache is the only means i have of communicating with certain people.

and i'm totally addicted to the internet. i'm not sure how i feel about that.

[TheSilenceEchoes]

Interesting post, Guido. I can relate to many things you've written.

I've become more aware of this phenomenon now the weather has been sunny of late. Sometimes i catch myself looking outside to the bright blue sky almost with the longing face of someone who is in the office and counting the hours until he (haha i automatically use a 'he' in this image ) can go outside and enjoy the last rays of the sun that will soon die away.
The shocking difference is that i am not at work, i can decide to go outside whenever i want!
So yes it's what i'm doing more now. But it's something that i have to tell myself to do, whether sitting down behind my pc and spending hours online is something that just seems to 'happen'.
Why does the internet seem to be more appealing (but at the same time not) than a laid-back oldfashioned sunny day in a park with my guitar for example?
Is it laziness? Is it explained socially?

I must say i have been thinking about deleting my account on facebook too, especially after reading something in a psychology magazine about how facebook creates narcissists and narcissistic behaviour.
I also talked with my sister in law a while ago and she said that because of facebook (and things alike) there seems to have been a shift in how people experience things. A lot of people carry cameras with them all the time, not for the sake of art, but to record every in their eyes significant experience so they can share it. They experience a moment or rather 'shape' a moment with 'i'm going to post this on facebook' already in their mind. This way the publicing of an experienced moment seems to become the key thing, not experiencing the moment itself..
There is a danger that people forget how to just enjoy a moment and nothing more. No thoughts about posting stuff. Just a moment between you and you. Nothing wrong with that. There is in fact i think a lot of necessary growing & calming in that.

This shift in thinking is a contageous thing that has not only an effect on how people experience moments, but also on how they view themselves. A lot of people start to feel unimportant or inferior when their lives seem to be less 'interesting' than their friends' on facebook. So people try to make their life look more interesting than it really is. Facebook becomes fakebook. The thing behind it is i think in most cases genuine loneliness, not narcissism. People want to be seen. This loneliness is caused by on the one hand our hurried, individualistic society. Everybody is living for themselves and there is not much genuine attention (especially: time) for the other anymore.
There also seems to be this unwritten law nowadays that people are not worthy in themselves anymore, but rather that they have to earn it. You have to have impressive skills, looks, possessions, relationships to 'be somebody'. You have to stand out first before you earn attention. As if attention has become something that is scarce, that can only be given to a certain group of people. I think the contrary is the case. There is an abundance of attention that people feel the need to have for other people, but because this society has turned so individualistic, people are beginning to forget how to do that. Because the tendency is still there (i think it's part of being human), i think the news junkies are born.

For me the main reason i have not deleted my account on facebook is because i love sharing things with people so much, simply because i just happen to be an open person. I also love learning from other people too. I will be honest, for me there is a danger that i forget how to simply enjoy moments without feeling the need to share them. That's why i have been pondering about this whole thing a lot lately. A month ago i've deleted about 150 friends, because i realized i didn't care sharing things with ALL those people! I will probably delete more until in the end there will be a small group of friends left, that are people that i know outside facebook or that i think i will get to know outside facebook. Deleting those friends alone already gave me a peaceful feeling.

Simplifying your life in our information-overloaded complex society is so important. No one can handle more than 100 friends, let alone 500! No one can handle all the information the internet offers. It's hard to dose things that seem appealing and infinite. Why do you think so many children are diagnozed with AD(H)D? They become stressful and hyper because of all the sensory input their little studious, curious brains have to progress every day! Compare cartoons for little children from 1980 with ones from now... It's perplexing. Almost frightening.
I look at the modern western world and i see this cacophony of things, voices, people, words, melodies, rhymes all screaming for our attention. The internet is worst of all, even though it seems so quiet and organized when you click the icon. We live most of our lives in our head, staring at screen that does the moving, the talking, the imagining for us.. No wonder so many are plagued by this vague feeling as if they are constantly missing out on 'life'.

Guido, your post was really inspiring. I will leave facebook alone for a while too. I've done it before and remember the relieved feeling it gave me, instead of the expected anxious feeling of missing out!!

This is the same with possessions (last thing, i promise ). For a long time now i'm giving up more and more of my possessions. (i keep typing poison instead of possesion for some reason.........), because the relieved feeling it gives me is almost addictive. I have also stopped buying things i don't need. I just want to have enough and nothing more. I've started to dislike 'shopping' even (and i'm woman! ). But to hold something in your hands, wanting to buy it and then saying to yourself: do i really need this? No, i have enough. And hanging / putting it back... it just feels so good. Not a proud feeling of: wow, i've done something really difficult, but a relieved feeling of: oh good, i'm free still and still light-weighed.

The less possesions one has, the lighter one weighs. The lighter one weighs, the easier one travels. The easier one travels, the further one travels, the further one travels, the more one experiences (meeting people, seeing beauty). The more one experiences, the richer one is.

[Guido]

In this age, longing back to old times and reminiscing over things that once were (as in: es war einmal, a beautiful German phrase) isn't merely escapism, psychologically and rationally escaping to a time when things were supposedly better than now. This psychological phenomenon is typically attributed to old, cynical people who didn't see their dreams come true and use this method to attribute their lack of happiness to the changing of the times. I personally honestly believe that things were better before the internet, when entertainment wasn't as readily available as it is now. I feel that ten years ago I experienced engaging in various activities in a way more sincere and captivating way than I do now. In order to summarize your and mine perceptions of how we tend to intercommunicate these days and how we engage in activities, and how this subsequently drains a sincere form of happiness in our lives and leaves us with a peculiar feeling of fulfillment without being sincerely happy: I think that in our times we tend to break everything down to its bare bones, we have become extremely pragmatical, as opposed to subject ourself to the wide range of emotions that life has the potential of offering to us. The typical person living today in our geographical area (Western world) tends to engage into activities with the sole purpose of deriving a very hedonistic and one-dimensional pleasure of it, that is to say, a pleasure which is like a number on a certain scale, and we aim for that number to be as high as possible (every assessment of pleasure is done by measuring it to very simple scales: more, bigger, smaller, faster). About narcissism: I believe that at the root of the human psychological reward system is the desire to be respected. The same applies here: we break our colorful intercommunication with each other down to its bare psychological root: to be respected. Nowadays, we have degenerated to a very afraid society: to only want to gain what we deem most valuable in our pragmatic minds and discard or ignore what could bring us fulfillment on a deeper level is a result of panic. Nowadays, we thrive on hedonism and a false feeling of ecstasy, false because it only provokes the most rudimentary circuitry of our minds, and it are only these rudimentary psychological reward systems that we attempt to satisfy when we panic.

[BrandNewRetro]

I'm sure time seems to have sped up about 10x since I found the internet. I reckon if someone collated all the time I spent online and came up with an average of hours (yes, I know it's gonna be hours!) of time I spent on the webs per day, I would probably be quite disgusted...I mean, I must have spent a good 15 minutes reading the posts on this thread alone. I do think I need to commit myself to some sort of internet dieting plan

[Waterbagel]

HA, guido, i took your advice
at least for a night

instead of sitting on facebook all night until i finally feel like going to bed at like midnight, i just.. got off
i logged off. walked around my house for a bit, scopin' out some food.
got bored, caved in. got on facebook

within that 5 minutes

they apparently found the body of osama bin laden, and my facebook news feed was exploding

eh, back to.. .. whatever

[coffee grapes]

[Waterbagel]

Anyway, thats my story. I see the reasoning behind everyones points, but I think as long as you try not to browse too much, and try to actually post useful stuff rather than just being bored and using it as entertainment/boredom relief it doesnt mess with your mind too much.

yes, i agree
there's already quite a bit of.. fluff.. having to do with the internet already, though :\
a part i don't like about it is how the advertisement business has thrived

[GrangalanJr]

A lot of people carry cameras with them all the time, not for the sake of art, but to record every in their eyes significant experience so they can share it. They experience a moment or rather 'shape' a moment with 'i'm going to post this on facebook' already in their mind. This way the publicing of an experienced moment seems to become the key thing, not experiencing the moment itself..

I recognized a few years ago that the Internet had become kind of a "default" or "norm" for me in many ways. Maybe the best way to describe it as that I stopped thinking of the net as a break from my offline life, and started thinking of my offline life as a break from the net. The net has somehow become my "real life" now, the given framework around which the rest of life is built. As pathetic as that sounds, it also seems true, at least purely as a function of chronology: I nearly always spend more of the waking hours in a day at the computer than away from it.

I have taken breaks up to a few weeks long, but there is always this background mumbling in my mind, wondering what I will do when I get back to "the usual." I kind of hate it.

On the other hand, I love technology. I love making music with my computer, and programming, and learning about cool new stuff on the net. I seem to swing from extreme to extreme, on the one hand spending most of my day on the computer, and then on other days wanting to toss it into the dumpster and spend my life reading books and playing acoustic guitar.

[Magic Brenda]

I think maybe because of how old I am and not having grown up with the internet, I have a bit of a healthier attitude towards it: I can turn it off as happily as I can turn it on and it makes no difference to me, it's a tool, nothing more or less. I'm not going to opine that "you need to get out more" or "read a book instead" or any of that, I think it's just a case of trying to find the middle ground, going from one extreme to the other just enforces a binge and purge cycle: it's as unhealthy to completely cut yourself off from one source of information and entertainment as it is any other.

One thing that does really fascinate me is Facebook though. I added a few guys from work, and whereas they're right enough to have a chat with and get on at work, I find their main interests quite dull: football, computer games, horror movies and stuff, so I hid them from my news feed. I mentioned this to one of the guys at work (who I've hidden) and he was mortified. Like, genuinely upset and pissed off. I said to him "I don't talk to you about this stuff here, so why do I want to engage with it when I'm not?" and he really couldn't get past the fact that I had slighted him in some way and wasn't "friends" enough. Another guy kept posting pictures of his new baby, same went for him and it was a personal attack on his child or something. And then there are people who have 273 friends. No, you don't, it's some peculiar ego thing to show everyone how popular you would like them to think you are.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy Facebook. I've had some fun chats and found out some interesting and entertaining stuff (and shared it also). What I really don't understand is when people seem to come around to the opinion that their Facebook profile is somehow their definitive idealised self and put more time and effort into the upkeep of their profile than they do themselves.

[Vexille]

It seems to me that a lot of people internet and tv because they have nothing better to do and can't be assed to find something else to do. It's a last resort. Got nothing going on in your life? It's ok, the internet and eleventy billion tv channels are there so you don't have to find something to do.

My internet usage is basically a few forums, clothes and shopping, some facebook, music news and downloading. That's it. I try not to spend too much time on forums but it really is hard not to. Most of the forums I browse regularly are directly related to my hobbies. When I visit them it's for a specific reason related to my hobby. There are a few exceptions and I wish I had more time to read them too because the people are interesting.

Is it just me or is facebook now borderline pointless? It's like everybody has their own blog of useless crap. If you are friends with them personally they expect you to be subscribed to their useless crap blog. Uh no, I don't need to be kept updated on where you are and what you are doing 24/7. My favorite facebook users make a wall post once or twice a week at best and usually it's something worth checking out. They are not using their wall to beg for attention.

Oh and I got accused of being anti-social because somebody posted on my wall and I didn't see it all weekend. I'm sorry I was out camping where there was no cell phone reception, let alone 3g.

[Guido]

There, deleted my Facebook friends until I had 4 left.

[BrandNewRetro]

There, deleted my Facebook friends until I had 4 left.

Hope it pans out to be a helpful move

[Waterbagel]

There, deleted my Facebook friends until I had 4 left.

come to think of it, i haven't had a good friend clean-up in a while

[tontonz]

Thought I had browsed this topic for too long to not post and give some commemorations to some insightful folk on here! Thesilentechoes made about a billion swell points that has quickly risen up in modern western society. I think the whole narcissistic-psychoanalytic aspect of facebook varies widely across those who use it, but is thriving on the psyche no less. Of course we all have egos, its a basic vital function of the brain, one with which we cannot live with out. What differs is how our ego states dominant our waking life, perhaps even on the unconscious level. I am no proponent of Freudian psychoanalysis, and he is scraped away by the majority of the scientific community, but Freud was really getting at something, something that could not be explained with chemical reactions and social behaviorism. It is that when we reach self-actualization, then we no longer find "our self". A self-actualized person is a person who has transcended his "self" being. This is a much more humanistic approach, Maslowian per se, but the two schools of thought have an overarching principle. This becomes ridiculously obvious on the internet realm, where our inner egos come much more into play. The difference is equivalent to a one on one conversation to speaking in front of a crowd of 100. And facebook is the crowd of hundreds, depending on how much you friend whore. I won't rant any longer on the subject, but I feel that psychoanalytics has become much more pertinent to western culture due to overabundance in resources and therefore expanded egos to soak up as much as possible.



Some interesting quotes:
"And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not. "
-Soren Kierkegaard

"If you can discover a better way of life than office-holding for your future rulers, a well-governed city becomes a possibility. For only in such a state will those rule who are truly rich, not in gold, but in the wealth that makes happiness--a good and wise life."
-Plato

"The happy life is thought to be one of excellence; now an excellent life requires exertion, and does not consist of amusement. If Eudaimonia, or happiness, is activity in accordance with excellence, it is reasonable that it should in accordance with the highest excellence; and this will be that of the best thing in us. "
-Aristotle

"Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman--a rope over an abyss. A dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under. I love those who do not know how to live, for they are those who cross over. "
-Friedrich Nietzsche

" Heaven lasts long, and Earth abides

What is the secret of their durability? Is it because they do not live for themselves that they endure so long?"
-Lao Tzu



And thank you Kashmir Boots for bringing up such an engaging topic, I absolutely enjoy listening to your music and I play it often on my specialty show. I must say I am very impressed by your posts and musical abilities, which is an incredibly rare quality to have on the internet these days.

tontonz over and out!

[turquoise70]

i like fuckin hate shit and stuff

i'm addicted to the internet and whatever

i don't intend to ever stop EVER

this is where my life is

[Guido]

No friends left. I did this instead of deactivating/deleting my account because I tried deactivating it but after some time I would automatically pop up in my friends' lists again, without having logged in.

It's really for the best, whenever I wake up the first thing I always did was grab my phone and look for Facebook updates and my heart started pounding. Also whenever I'm doing other things like visiting friends I check my phone every 10 minutes to check for updates and kinda interrupt the conversation. I'm a total addict.