"it allows us to get really comfortable wasting a lot of time."
And then the article fell completely to pieces. If you view your time searching for new information as a "waste", then you're going to end up in a world of self inflicted ignorance.
We have the capabilities of sifting through bleeding edge information that shapes our lives on a daily basis with the internet. The act of ignoring this blatant fact is to effectively censor your own education. Why not just try to stay away from all of the meme loaded bullshit that the internet has to offer instead?
Because not everybody has enough self control. I'm sure most people who waste too much time on reddit/tumblr/etc. realize they could be spending their time more productively, and many of them have made an effort to do so and failed. At that point they can try again, or just go with the nuclear option.
I would bet that cutting off their internet entirely would be a net positive for a surprising number of web users.
The only problem I have is a desperate will for people to work out self control without resulting to absolute extremes. I really want to make the argument that people should just tone it down a bit, and maybe try to remove themselves from the shit that ends up actually being wasted time (facebook, 9gag, mainstream reddit, stumble, etc), but there's a part of me that completely sides with the idea that people should just fuck off from it entirely and enjoy the nice day.
I don't really have an issue with time management, so my internal conflict ends up hanging on the fact that I've never been in those proverbial shoes.
"We have the capabilities of sifting through bleeding edge information that shapes our lives on a daily basis with the internet."
What exactly are you talking about here? Of the top of my head I can't thank of anything on the internet that isn't a total waste of time, with two exceptions:
- looking up specific information (programming docs, the first 10 minutes on wikipedia, etc)
- browsing the arXiv
So, let's see here. You read this post on HN, so that means you have been spending time reading posts and responding to comments like this. That to me is wasting time. Is there nothingelse that you need to do right now? You wasted that time. This is his point, and it's a good one.
But every single person responding to his post on this page, even those like me who defend him justdon'tgetit. We have to unplug. We wonder why all of the developed countries have not been producing and China and India are. You know why? Because we are wasting our fucking time on the internet, that's why. You can blame it on the fucking Fed, the fucking banks, fucking Wall Street, the fucking automobile industry, the fucking terrorists, the fucking e-Trade shit and wild speculation and investing in e-shit that caused the fucking dot bomb bubble, but in the end, this shit is our ownfuckingfault. We are a bunch of lazy fucks, and we need to get the fuck off our computers and do something productive.
Taking a 5 minute break from writing a php tutorial sounds pretty therapeutic to me.
I have a degree in computer science with a wonderful salaried 8-5 job (doing what I love) with benefits, a wonderful girlfriend of 5 years, and 3 excellent cats. We take walks and go out to our downtown area to socialize in the many available bars on the weekends, and take vacations whenever she can get time off from work. I also greatly enjoy working on my project car when I have a spare weekend and the money required to buy parts and tools.
I'm incredibly happy with my life and what I have to show for it. I'm also incredibly grateful for the plethora of new things that I learn on a daily basis while browsing HN and reddit during little breaks from coding.
It seems as though you're a rather agitated individual at the moment, given the overtone of self deprecation in your post, but I really think that you should examine the good (great, amazing even) parts of internet citizenry along with the unfortunately bad.
Every time I see a post like this (including Paul Miller over at the Verge), it reminds me of an obese person suddenly deciding to go anorexic. You know what the problem is? It's not the food. It's self-control, plain and simple.
It makes sense for an obese person to stop stocking the pantry and refrigerator with ice cream, cookies, chips, and soda. Binge eating and sugar addiction are serious problems, and just blaming people and telling them they have “bad self control” doesn’t really solve anything. Putting dangerous temptation out of reach, however, can have real benefits. (Although usually overeating is also linked to other unrelated stress, so this may mainly be treating a symptom rather than the root cause.)
The proper analogy to getting rid of the internet connection would be throwing out the refrigerator, the cabinets and every piece of food or food holding device you have.
Of course, you'd be risking dying of hunger to do so, just as you'd be risking intellectual death by cutting off the internet.
> risking intellectual death by cutting off the internet
Give me a fucking break. I know many people (even several programmers) without an internet connection at home, and none of them are at any sort of risk of “intellectual death”.
"intellectual death" is a little hyperbolic, I think. I too know people who spend little to no time on the internet and seem to be quite intellectual, informed, functional, and happy.
It's the people that get their "information" from daily doses of "I saw it on the internet" that worry me, to be honest. Some people I know that spend the most time on the internet seem able to tell you a lot of stuff they read and saw, but are not able to apply much intellect to it.
As a programmer I want to think that it's just self control, that we can impose discipline on ourselves (or products) and engineer a solution. The thing is that it looks like from the recent studies that the internet fundamentally changes the way our brain works. I'm away from my copy of The Shallows by Nicholas Carr [1] but I know that he references specific studies on the way the internet changes the brain. Here is a quote I found from a recent interview with NPR:
"Neuroscientists and psychologists have discovered that, even as adults, our brains are very plastic," Carr explains. "They're very malleable, they adapt at the cellular level to whatever we happen to be doing. And so the more time we spend surfing, and skimming, and scanning ... the more adept we become at that mode of thinking."
I highly recommend The Shallows[1]. It's a look at the way the internet is changing our brains. It really might be a good idea to limit exposure to the internet. As a programmer and geek it's worth spending some time thinking about these questions and least being aware of the affects of the medium.
I'm not sure if this was in the book you're describing, but I remember reading somewhere that was has changed is that we no longer remember specific facts (Boston is the capital of Massachusetts), rather where we can find them most easily (Wikipedia). Whether or not that's a change for the better, I couldn't say.
There's something to be said about forcing yourself to develop new habits. Take away the distractions for a while, and you'll find that when you add them back, it's harder to break these new habits.
Just focusing on self-control is very hard. Take smoking, for instance -- it's hard to just "cut down" when that temptation is always there.
You have to force or trick yourself into changing habits, the problem with habits is that they become automatic responses to some stimuli; enter "habit change Wood" into Google Scholar for some interesting reading, especially a pdf of http://cdp.sagepub.com/content/15/4/198.short , which is the single best article I have found.
I program every day. I live on the internet. I blog (privately), plan projects, work on said projects, and inhale information probably 15 hours per day- sometimes more (I don't sleep much).
A week ago, a lightning strike took out my internet. I didn't react this way at all.
I don't remember being bored except for the last day, when I was waiting for the Ethernet to USB adapter to get here (My Ethernet port was damaged, along with my modem and router).
I read a book. I watched the history channel. I drank some coffee and spent some time with my family. I read another book. I got a hair cut.
This isn't a problem with what the internet allows you to do. It's a problem with what you do with your time.
Edit: My boredom on the last day can probably be attributed to the maker habit of not getting into something when interruption is imminent.
I think the internet is more boring than any outside activity. Sure, it's an easy and comfortable way to get information and communicate with each other, but I see it mostly as a tool. I think the internet gets overused by the most people. A lot of people, even here at work, are online on Facebook, because they don't want to miss anything. But what would you miss if you doesn't read thats a boring day for someone, someone liked your newest image upload or something else? I don't understand this weird behaviour, but maybe it's just me doing sth. wrong.
Interesting until "we still have our phones." From what I observe while commuting current smart phones are very amenable to wasting time on the internet.
And then the article fell completely to pieces. If you view your time searching for new information as a "waste", then you're going to end up in a world of self inflicted ignorance.
We have the capabilities of sifting through bleeding edge information that shapes our lives on a daily basis with the internet. The act of ignoring this blatant fact is to effectively censor your own education. Why not just try to stay away from all of the meme loaded bullshit that the internet has to offer instead?