Anti-Climacus

Allow me to share Norm's befuddlement on this question:

Though she doesn't quite, Aleks Krotoski comes close to recommending a form of digital Sabbatarianism here. We all need to switch off our machines periodically, take a complete break, enjoy the sunshine, that sort of thing. How about this, instead? Let everyone do what they want when they want - switch off, stay tuned, alternate. ... the truth is that it more often happens to me that I can't blog when I want to than it happens that I'm connected to the internet when I don't want to be. Because when I don't want to be, I don't be - just like that.

This has come up a few times in the Program, when people will disclaim facebook, or email, or blogs, or text messages, as technologies which will somehow estrange us from the real world, which only consists of face-to-face conversation or Serious Academic Work, ie writing articles. The idea, I gather, is that these distractions have a narcotic power to compel our attention whether we want to give it or not. Better, then, to just not bother.

But seriously: the internet is no more a distraction than anything else. The newspaper, the tv, books, music, staring at the wall, even face-to-face conversations can all distract you from things you otherwise should be doing. What's more, these distractions are substitutable. If you don't want to work, you will find something to make distraction possible. If you need to work, and have mastered adulthood, you put the pleasure of the internet (or anything else) off until your work is done. This is not complicated.

The most serious internet users I know are also the people most able to stop when they need to stop. If you have work to do, go do it. If you're out with friends, enjoy that. The internet will be there when you get back, all bloggy items compiled in your RSS reader, all facebook posts listed chronologically. I blog a medium amount, mostly on the weekends and then distributed throughout the week at 7:50am or 3:30pm. I blog to keep myself writing, to give myself smaller compositional problems than "where does the war termination versus jus post bellum distinction best fit in this paper?" and out of a general vestigial  habit of blogging.