Early on mornings like this — when rain is falling upon the roof, and the street is gray, and damp cold pervades the air — the glowing screen is a warm and inviting refuge. It does not demand but waits, offering its aura and enclosing hum. Alive and breathing with the sound of its hidden workings, promising and almost delivering wonder, the machine is an opiate as well as a stimulant. Indeed it conveys the appeal of all the stimulants stacked together and interchangeable at the flick of the wrist: hallucinogenic reverie, alcoholic nostalgia, distance and peace to match the most rarefied bud. All our proclivities, our hidden dreams and fantasies, the knotted spine of our desires: it’s all there, splayed and displayed, laid out and waiting. Some of us are too old for this: we don’t get the appeal, the machine seems too slick and needlessly complex, the ephemeral world it offers feels cold and impersonal. We do not perceive the machine to be an extension of our own consciousness. But for the young, for those growing up immersed in the online stream, theirs is a consciousness nurtured by, and to some extent dependent upon, the technology of self-creation. The older among us are dismissive of this reality, a schism is growing between the ages, the binary web multiplies.
I read the online news, check my email, and wonder once again about the persistent ingress of this technology into my life. I think about my ever-increasing screen time, I worry about repetitive strain injuries, I ruminate on the line between healthy geekiness and Internet addiction. And I recognize that the computer has become indispensable. It is both a portal and a vast library — infinite, almost. I think of Jorge Luis Borges and his story about an endless library, a library that comprises an entire universe and is also a prison. I no longer visit the library at the university — why bother, when I can access everything I need from home — and my six hundred dollars in overdue fines remains unpaid. But I do miss the smell of slowly-moldering books, and the enforced quiet of the stacks, and the margin notes made by careless readers that I used to find in old books. Notices were posted against defacing books in this manner, yet sometimes such errant scribbles were an un-looked-for confirmation that someone — anyone — had been here before me, searching, as was I, for illumination within the books of lost ages.
The Web does not offer such accidental and imaginal histories. Its architecture is shifting and ephemeral. Nothing stays for too long, nothing remains the same. The Web evolves, which is part of its appeal. It’s always fresh, edging toward the new and the innovative. For someone like me — habitually looking forward, hungry for knowledge and change — the online world is like crack cocaine. My curiosity is nurtured there, and satisfied, and amplified again, so that I become ever more curious. I wander, and join virtual communities — of programmers and Linux freaks and conspiracy theorists — and feel that I am learning, and growing, and preserving a youthful spirit. Yet this morning, as on many mornings, I look toward the trees and the wet lawn and I trace the contour of the creek and I wonder about my sacrifices: less time spent in nature, fewer new books for our home library, decreasing effort to spend time in the shop on woodworking projects. In these moments I become certain that I am indeed an addict.
