I used to spend a lot of time on the internet. But when my evil roommate finally announced he was sick of the blue Ethernet cables littering our kitchen, I decided to go unplugged for a year. Oddly, I wasn’t upset. Rather than putting the effort into rationalizing the irrational situation, I valiantly accepted my fate and started to think about the virtues of being internet-free.
At first, I was looking forward to an electronically simple life-one lacking the plethora of unrewarding MSN hours and aimless web browsing. I envisioned a world where focusing on schoolwork would be easy, and where my other non-academic interests could finally be cultivated. I would be spending more time listening to music, reading books for leisure and keeping active. After all, it was natural to presume that a reduction in unproductive electronic hours would translate into increase in productive work hours.
However, I soon found out that this presumption was false; the translation between unproductive and productive waking hours wasn’t an even quid pro quo. I just found more inventive ways to waste my time. Instead of sending emails, I started to send text messages. I substituted directionless MSN conversations with directionless statistics at the Journal Citation Reports. Without the lure of the Internet, I even started spending less time at home, drastically reducing the number of homemade vegan dinners I ate and, bizarrely, increasing my meat intake. While on campus, I browsed the Internet compulsively but violently.
And so my naïve theory of 1-to-1 correspondence was disconfirmed. Even worse, an aspect of my former productive self were now deteriorating: I no longer maintained solid electronic relations. No more little notes to my progenitors, TAs, or friends, and no more mass emails promoting my weekly jazz shows. True, I could have kept up the correspondence during my daily visits to the library, but writing intimate emails on sterile public computers is usually too formidable a task for me.
To be sure, a number of good consequences accompanied my unplugging. As predicted, my non-academic efforts flourished more this year than they ever have: I kept a journal, published articles, read fiction and even learned to play the piano. My social life, for the most part, developed: I dated a divers set of eligible gentlewomen, as well as befriending logic nerds. My marks even went up.
Unfortunately, all of these good consequences have alternate explanations. Take my GPA, for example: this year, I dropped an embarrassing number of courses. I should have stayed in that difficult Aristotle class, and I should have stayed in that lame psychology class, but I didn’t. And consider my “enhanced” social life. My new friends and muses are more likely a result of my recent parting with a girlfriend than my Internet-impoverished lifestyle.
If all of these apparent virtues are sensible explanations elsewhere, then why assume that there are any virtues to unplugging at all? After spending the last seven months without the Internet, the bad consequences outweigh the good ones. This makes it hard to pick out the virtues of unplugging, especially when we can explain away the positive effects.
My own view is that the virtues of unplugging are, if anything, inert. Not having the Internet is more paralyzing than soothing for our cultural milieu. We communicate through it; we develop relationships through it. Trying to resist it in favour of returning to a glorified state of nature is just pretentious. This is especially evident given the overtly inconvenient consequences of doing so.
I was, however, afforded one insight from this year’s electronically simple life: temperance is a far nobler virtue than mere abstinence. It is much more difficult to moderate your Internet addiction than it is to abstain from it at home. That being said, I did neither: I have been ferociously addicted to checking my email at school. Maybe things might have been different if I had completely avoided the Internet this year.
In sum, my analogue utopia was a valorized hallucination. Plug me in.
