Had a couple visiting us from Washington last week.
Make that half a couple. The guy was charming, witty, interesting and eager to explore new places.
His wife was wired.
Almost literally. She’s an Investment Something-or-Other back in Washington and I don’t know why she wasted money on the trip because she never really left her office.
First day, she plunked her laptop on the dining room table, flipped it open, turned it on …and seldom took her eyes off it for the next three days. She was constantly ‘following the market’ or ‘wrangling e-mails’ or ‘checking eBay’.
When she did manage to break free of the laptop’s hypnotic tractor beam she still wasn’t really in the room with us. Her eyes would wander and before long she’d lurch spasmodically, haul her BlackBerry out of her pocket and smile apologetically. “Getting an e-mail,” she would murmur. Then she would turn away from the table to peck out her response.
She wasn’t being intentionally rude; she couldn’t help herself. There’s a viral contagion sweeping the globe and she’s got it bad. I wish Marshall McLuhan was still around — he’d encapsulate what’s going on in one gnomic epigram.
What it looks like to me, is we are, all of us, being wired into one continuous, unblinking, Earth-encircling electric circuit.
Consider this: in 1815 it took weeks for news of the outcome of the Battle of Waterloo to reach the ears of the citizens of Edinburgh.
Last month anyone with a smart phone anywhere in the world could track the London riots in real time
Or consider this: a recent Angus Reid poll found that one out of five Canadians – twenty percent of us – would turn down a million dollars rather than lose our Internet access.
When I read that in the paper I found it so unbelievable I had to check it. Seems like it’s true. In a poll conducted online on May 23 and 24, 1,009 Canadians were asked the following question: “Would you rather receive one million dollars and never use the Internet again or would you prefer to keep the Internet?”
Twenty percent of the respondents said they’d rather be online than be a millionaire.
You don’t have to be a tech junkie to be affected by the seductive siren call of the Internet. I don’t do Facebook or Twitter (does anyone aside from hospital patients in full body casts truly have time for that?) — but I get ‘way more e-mails than I need in my life — and I spend ‘way too many hours dealing with them.
There are only 24 hours in the day and if we’re spending more and more time online, it means we’re spending less and less time doing something else.
For some people it means less sleep; others lose out on sports and recreational activities.
For me, it’s books. I am not reading nearly as many books as I used to.
I want to. I still buy books and start them. Then they join the teetering stacks of unread or half-read tomes beside my bed. I just can’t concentrate as well as I used to.
I can no longer, as literary critic David Ulin wrote “find within myself the quiet necessary to read.”
I think it’s because I’m subconsciously waiting for the book to beep or ping or buzz or transport me to a related video link.
I think I’m actually waiting for — expecting — a distraction that will titillate me, divert me, take me away from the grunt work of reading.
Oh, I still ingest reams of data — blogs, YouTube videos, favourite websites and clever stuff my friends send me.
Trouble is, it’s mostly crap, or at best, entertaining minutiae that won’t mean a thing two months from now.
A good book is a three-course meal; an hour on the Internet is like OD’ing on Granddad’s Bacon Rinds.
A good book is the opposite of that. It’s the distillation of a premise or an idea or a flight of fancy that someone thought was worthy of preserving in a form that wouldn’t change for centuries. As Samuel Butler said, “The oldest books are just out to those who haven’t read them.”
Don’t mistake me — I’m not dissing the Internet. It’s revolutionary and it’s mind-blowing. Internet Technology is the biggest thing to come along in my lifetime — so far.
But when it comes to content, I’m not sure about the shelf life.
