The Noughties: Fractions

Web User’s recent headline, “Brits spend three days a month online”, offers a nice soundbite and though the “facts” within their article simply reveal the results of a survey given by a company with a vested interest, that wouldn’t exist unless people were sitting in front of a screen providing a predominantly textual window into the world. I’d say it was pretty accurate. Indeed I expect that if I were to keep my own diary, taking all of the hours into account, I too would be horrified by the amount of time I spend online, wondering what happened to me, and why I don’t have something better to do.

The story of my decade would be a randomly edited avant-guard production consisting mostly of shots of me sitting in front of a keyboard of some description. I first went online at home in the final embers of the nineties and it’s long enough now that I can’t really remember what it was like not to be in front of the internet somehow. I used computers a lot in the 90s so that wasn’t anything new; but to have all this information and the capacity to communicate at my finger tips from the moment I wake up to when I got to bed, that was something new.

When I was in Stratford-Upon-Avon earlier this year, I cut myself off from the web and from television. My only sources of information were a radio and newspapers and I felt liberated. By the day I came home I’d decided that I wouldn’t spend half as much time online that I’d continue with the simple pleasured I’d rediscovered, of reading, of listening to plays, of eating out. Why spend so much time online anyway? And yet months later, here I am again. It’s the itch, as the article says of one in four people, there’s the wonder if I’m missing anything, a bargain, a meetup, an arts show, not to mention the news about this that and everything else going on in the world.

Do I feel the isolation sometimes? Yes, and probably more than sometimes. Do I feel like a richer person because of the web? Yes, that too. I have a far greater awareness of the world, of how it all fits together, how nothing is clear cut, how everyone in fact has a vested interest. But the result is that I also find it difficult to settle on one thing, my mind often splitting in half, even smaller fractions, as I think about how to achieve the next task whilst still accomplishing whatever’s in front of me, even in my leisure time, with the result that they something cancel each other out and I’m left broken. Perhaps Lily Allen has a point. And you won’t hear me say that often, no matter how much I like her music.