Our Web addiction
Posted on | March 12, 2008 | No Comments
I started this blog post the other day in my old-fashioned notebook; Lee Gomes finished it for me today. It Gomes, writing his Wall Street Journal column, has the answer: We’re powerless. It’s in our genes.
started like this: Sometimes I just want to delete every digital thing I participate in. I want to sit in the quiet of my evenings, with a kerosene lamp, a fountain pen and a notebook and just write that way. No ghostly white pall cast on my face from a computer screen. Just the warm, amber glow of lamplight, putting the writing mind at ease. Writing online—hell, participating online—usually feels like a fetish. I look forward to jumping online and exploring the limitless amounts of information at my fingertips. Invariably I feel drained and frustrated after a while, as what I thought was there really isn’t.
“…coming across what Dr. Biederman calls new and richly interpretable information triggers a chemical reaction that makes us feel good, which in turn causes us to seek out even more of it. The reverse is true as well: We want to avoid not getting those hits because, for one, we are so averse to boredom.”
So, like any addiction, can we manage it and harness it for good, not evil? Can we (do we) quit cold turkey?
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
No related posts.
Comments
Leave a Reply