Dan Nosowitz, “I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore”:
“The other day, I found myself looking at a blinking cursor in a blank address bar in a new tab of my web browser. I was bored. I didn’t really feel like doing work, but I felt some distant compulsion to sit at my computer in a kind of work-simulacrum, so that at least at the end of the day I would feel gross and tired in the manner of someone who had worked. What I really wanted to do was waste some time.
But… I didn’t know how. I did not know what to type into the address bar of my browser. I stared at the cursor. Eventually, I typed “nytimes.com” and hit enter. Like a freaking dad. The entire world of the internet, one that used to boast so many ways to waste time, and here I was, reading the news. It was even worse than working.
(It’s worth reading the whole article; it’s short, and I’m not about to quote every relevant piece of the article here.)
Here’s my own experience: when I first got proper access to the net at university back in 2001, I ended up with tab after tab after tab open, as I got lost in a spiral of links. These days… I end up with tab after tab after tab open, as I get lost in a spiral of links. The above from Dan isn’t something I can relate to at all; I can still find loads of things to do. A quick glance through the Trivia section on TV Tropes is all I need to end up reading endless fascinating stuff on obscure blogs. I can get stuck in much the same way on Wikipedia’s list of hoaxes, or spend hours lazing about on The Cutting Room Floor. And a visit to The Digital Antiquarian always lasts rather more time than I can officially spare to it. That’s just four examples out of hundreds.
Now, do I think that people spend too much time on social media these days in lieu of other stuff? Yes, I do, myself included.1 And there are many, many abandoned blogs that I wish were still updated. But that doesn’t mean the web is suddenly a wasteground. There’s always something for me to read or do online.
To be fair, Dan does go deeper than the above quote from his piece suggests:
“There is an argument that this my fault. I followed the wrong people; I am too nostalgic about bad blogs; I am in my 30s and what I used to think was fun time-killing is now deadly. But I don’t think so. What happened is that the internet stopped being something you went to in order to separate from the real world — from your job and your work and your obligations and responsibilities. It’s not the place you seek to waste time, but the place you go to so that you’ll someday have time to waste. The internet is a utility world for me now. It is efficient and all-encompassing. It is not very much fun.”
Maybe I’m lucky in that my work life barely involves the internet, except to check a few TV listings here and there. The net has never been about work for me. But then, I spend my work hours watching television for up to 12 hours a day… and then go back home and keep watching it while I have my tea. I’m not sure my work being online would affect me having fun on it too.
Anecdotally, however, here’s something which might be worth discussing. Because it’s true that I spend a great deal of time clicking around websites in a spiral of hot web action: but how many other people actually do that these days?
It used to be that when people visited one of my sites, they would have a look around and see what else was there. These days, that rarely seems to happen, according to my logs. People might come to Dirty Feed to read something that was linked to on Twitter… but they won’t click through to anything else and see what other things I’ve written.
Now, this could obviously be because people think what they’ve just read is complete shit, and they sure don’t need any more of that, thank you very much indeed. But I’ve talked to people about other websites, and this seems to be a common thing. Many people just don’t seem to click around like they used to. They’re far keener to go back to their Twitter or Facebook feeds rather than hanging around on a website, even if they found what they read interesting.
And this is something I find odd… because if I like something somebody has written, I’ll always look and see what else they’ve done. I might not read their entire oeuvre. But I’ll have a click around and see what else is on offer. A quick scroll through their archives to see if something catches me eye is the least I’ll do. And I’ll often end up with my aforementioned endless steam of open tabs.
Of course, the web has changed a lot in the last fifteen years. But I’m not sure it’s changed so much that it’s impossible for people to find fun things to read or do. I think some people are just getting out of the habit of clicking on a link and seeing where it will take them. And that’s a bit of a shame.
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One final thought. If the above doesn’t resonate with you, and if you really do feel you can’t find enough fun stuff online like you used to, the beautiful thing about the web is that you can do something about that.
More to the point, the web makes doing that very easy. For instance, a lot of TV made these days isn’t quite to my taste, shall we say. But there’s not much I can do about that. I can’t make the audience sitcom of my dreams, and blast it out to the nation. But I can write silly things online for free, and publish them.
Take my recent set of articles about Dennis Potter’s Nigel Barton plays. They didn’t set the world on fire; in fact, relatively few people read them at all. I got a bit grumpy about that at first, slightly embarrassingly, but then decided to take my own advice: numbers aren’t everything.2
The point is: those articles are something I wanted to exist in the world… so I went out there and wrote them. And we can all do this, or at least all of us who are in a position to write pontificating articles about the state of the web. If you’re not happy about the web as it is, you can go out there and do something about it.
So if the internet’s not fun for you any more… go out there and help make it fun again. None of us can change the world. But we can bend it, just a little. And if enough of us bend it, we might just get somewhere.