#digital sabbath

Thus laziness, my laziness, has been a steady focal point for me in my time of disconnect. I have accepted that I have two different ways that my slothful manners present themselves through me. One is the old way, the Internet Lazy. In the Internet Lazy stage I was on the Internet all the time instead of doing other things. "Other things" is an important notion, but I'll get to that later. While on the Internet I could still give the illusion of productivity or at least an illusion of some sort of progress. Notifications were being handled, podcasts listened to, forums indexed, news and information sites read. The lists may be pointless to some but there was still a list being made and I was knocking them off. Something was being done. The same mentality of illusion will go into effect shortly when I start doing close to nothing but watching missed TV shows and assorted Internet Content. They are presented to me in the pre-made form of a list. Episode 1 through season finale. Progress. Advancement. Still lethargic, but it can at least feel good. 

No Internet Lazy is different. No Internet Lazy is the complete lack of even an illusion of progress. It's days that end when you can't even lie to yourself that "at least I did blank" because that is literal. The day was blank. It is when those important "other things" come into the limelight. "Other things" are the dishes that could be washed but does it really matter right now? The place you could go but there is nobody ever to go with. The actual real, non-illusion version of progress and advancement. "Other things" are whatever is kind of bothering you in the back of your head while you watch reruns of Friends at 3 in the afternoon, un-showered, on your day off. No Internet Lazy is channel surfing with 5 channels.

No internet Lazy and Internet Lazy are most importantly both still me. I can safely say I prefer Internet Lazy over No Internet since at least with the Internet there is something to do. Even if it is an illusion, it's a damn comforting one at least. No Internet Lazy is worse because you're really doing nothing, you aren't even faking it. At least fake it.

I am and was still very much doing and being the same person in the middle of this that I was before it started it had just been a bit harder for me to reach the shelf of new information without the Internet. I read through 10 books, read the local, LA Times, New York Times and assorted other newspapers, and even purchased issues of physical magazines like Wired, The Atlantic, and Scientific Mind. Magazines, a phantom limb still tingling at the corner of my thoughts, that now mimic the Internet in design with their constant ads similar to webpages; I would end up browsing and skimming the leafs like I was opening and closing browser tabs, marking some by title for the Read Later app in my memories and putting the magazine down only to pick it back up again moments later. While absolutely none of the things I read had any instantaneous "Share" button on them at all (trust me, I looked). I still stayed up much later then I should, instead of being held by the Internet and the next new refresh it was the next chapter, the next page. Sometimes even the next infomercial.

PART TWO: A Phantom Limb

One of the few things I was able to do without faking it was reading books. One of the most relevant and interesting was one of the first books I did read and that was Nicholas Carr's "The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brain". A major topic of the book is the neuroscientific principle of neuroplasticity. Carr cites Alvaro Pascual-Leone that neuroplasticity is one of the most important products of evolution, a trait that enables the nervous system "to escape the restrictions of its own genome and thus adapt to environmental pressures, physiological changes, and experiences." Carr puts it more plainly as "Evolution has given us a brain that can literally change its mind––over and over again." Our brains can, are, and will continue to be rewritten by our actions, our experiences, and most importantly to this particular writing, our technology.  The main point Carr makes with the introduction and explanation of neuroplasticity in describing the ways the Internet has shaped our brain and understanding is that, "Neuroplasticity provides the missing link to our understanding of how information media and other intellectual technologies have exerted their influence over the development of civilization and helped to guide, at a biological level, the history of human consciousness." At a biological level the Internet is woven into us. 

Later Carr's gives the best example for the full concept of neuroplasticity in the explanation of the sensation of a "phantom limb." The reason people who suffer the loss of a limb when touched someplace else on the body will still feel as if they're missing limb is receiving the touch is likely because of the way the brain has the ability to reorganize and use neurons for different things. The "phantom limb" is the result of "neuroplastic changes in the brain".

Because of these ideals, I didn't just give up the internet with the Shut Off I was giving up habits and routines that have been fostering and molding through my neural synapses of my brain since I first logged into AOL in elementary school. I'm 25 now and I had... have... not only the Internet connection on computers but it transitioning into being stored in my pocket for the past four years as it grew into social networks and always refreshing streams of other people's, and my own, consciousness. 

Throughout it all I was still aware of the Internet. The past roughly four months of not using the Internet hasn't reworked my concept of the Internet as a place. It still sat there in my mind, the "phantom limb" of nearly another world. I could still feel that friends were posting things on Facebook. Still getting the tingling sensation about Youtube videos I hadn't watched going viral; that TV shows I wasn't able to watch were being processed to stream; That all the life that I think I inhabited before the disconnect was still there, right where it was before. The "phantom limb" of the Internet. The problem arose, however, that with a sensation of a "phantom limb" and the ideals learned of neuroplasticity, that my brain would eventually rewire these pathways of the Internet into some other processes. But I kept feeling it. I knew that in roughly four months that limb would still be there, waiting, progressing, as the days idled by towards January 1st for it all to grow back like nothing happened. 

PART THREE: The Web Smells Like Life

Carr explains the impetus for writing "The Shallows" as trying to respond to worrying about his "inability to pay attention to one thing for more than a couple of minutes." That he realized his brain, "wasn't just drifting. I was hungry. It was demanding to be fed the way the net fed it– and the more it was fed the hungrier it became. ...I wanted to be connected." He concludes his lament with "The internet, I sensed, was turning me into something like a high-speed data-processing machine. A human HAL. I missed my old brain." I, too, as it turns out missed my old brain as well. Except, the old brain I was missing was the connected one. I was being starved for three and a half months and want to be fed more than ever. More importantly to Carr's ideal is that I find the idea of the Internet turning me into a high-speed data-processing machine pretty damn awesome. 

Sherry Turkle's "Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other" was the second book I read after Nicholas Carr's "The Shallows." Both, clearly, ended up playing a pretty important role in how I thought about what I was doing on the Internet when I had it, how other people I know describe their ways of using the Internet, and likely how I will be using, or at least seeing how I use, the Internet in the future. Carr quotes Scott Karp, a blogger on online media, with a good summarization of how I have dealt with my view of the Internet since this disconnect and reading "The Shallows"  and "Alone Together", "What if I do all my reading on the Web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I'm just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?" The italics are mine, which I think you should figure out why. You could even add watching TV or any other form of media now to Karp's view of how the Internet is handled. I THINK differently about TV because the internet's way of giving it to me has changed how I watch. I THINK differently about reading because the way I can get books has changed. I'm seeking convenience now not for convenience sake but because it is just a better way.

Turkle continues this view in "Alone Together" with "...online reading, with its links and hypertext possibilities, often receives a heroic, triumphalist narrative, while the book is disparaged as 'disconnected.' ...The old reading was linear and exclusionary; the new reading is democratic as every text opens out to linked pages-chains of new ideas." The Wiki Spiral. Starting on your assignment of Rome and ending up reading about how protons are chained together to the processor of the Playstation 3 or any number of seemingly random daisy-chained wiki pages. A tactic I even still ably used to get from one book to the other offline. Turkle and others sometime see this as a possible detrimental thing because we lose our focus and our ability to think and "live life deliberately" as Thoreau put it in "Walden", something Turkle quotes liberally throughout "Alone Together". 

Her focus on "Walden" near the ending of "Alone Together", specially Thoreau's point of "where I live and what I live for", has her asking the question of, "Most recently, technology promises us lives on the screen. What values, Thoreau would ask, follow from this new location? Immersed in simulation, where do we live, and what do we live for?" The Internets new location, immersed in simulation, is a  beautiful clusterfuck of everything possible in life. To see it as a place that disconnects society to their own devices is to ignore the connected complexity of what we all collectively do on our devices. Is it not possible to encompass both a physical and simulated existences? A life lived deliberately through the "life mix" as an interview offers to Turkle, "...the mash-up of what you have on- and offline." A large portion of my social connectivity through most of my life has been done online be it through modern social networks like Facebook and video game forums before it or back into my days of MMORPG's like Everquest and World of Warcraft. I made friends on and in these places, some of which I've now met in person, some of which sent me cookies and a Christmas card of their two daughters. Wouldn't Facebook not be possible if it weren't for the actions and experiences we live in the "real world"? What we live for is not being excluded in this immersive simulations, it is being augmented by it. 

To some, perhaps myself included, the social and abstract wonderment of the internet can be a better alternative to what they get out of life outside the physical door. Technology writer and first editor of Wired Kevin Kelly finds vitality on the Web (as quoted in "Alone Together"), "At times I've entered the web just to get lost. In the lovely surrender, the web swallows my certitude and delivers the unknown. Despite the purposeful design of its human creators, the web is a wilderness. Its boundaries are unknown, unknowable, its mysteries uncountable. The bramble of intertwined ideas, links, documents, and images create an otherness as thick as a jungle. The web smells like life." Continues Kelly; "The net's daydreams have touched my own, and stirred my heart. If you can honestly love a cat, which can't give you directions to a stranger's house, why can't you love the web?" Mild creepiness aside, it is a fair and strong point. My cat rips my hand apart to show its affection. The Internet gives me nothing but exactly what I ask for (and sometimes a few surprises that I'm not comfortable with but I'll go with it since I'm already there). What better response to if I'm living "life deliberately" then a meticulously crafted homepage for people to see? I live on the internet and I live life for YouTube videos of cats falling off things. And somehow the thought of an entire generation living their lives deliberately for this doesn't scare me. It gives me hope. A society beyond multitasking to multi-lifing. A society able to freely share what they thinking, mundane or not, opens up people to each other in a way that the past wasn't able, or even comfortable, with doing. Even Thoreau in "Walden" sounds like he is making the wish of a great miracle that sounds absurdly like his desire for the Internet, "Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant? We should live in all the ages of the world in a hour; ay, in all the worlds of the ages. History, Poetry, Mythology! I know of no reading of another's experience so startling and informing as this would be." The eyes of people's Facebook; the living in the history, poetry, and mythology of the ages through Wikipedia. I feel that in the modern day Thoreau house near Walden Pond would have a pretty great WiFi connection. 

PART FOUR: I'm Smarter Than You, Old Man

 In another book I read about the internet while not using the internet was, Digital Divide a collection of essays and excerpts about connectivity, Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan wrote in the excerpt from iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind  how quickly, in single generation time frames, our brains have been changed evolutionarily by the use of the Internet. They point out, "In an average brain, the number of synaptic connection sites has been estimated at 1,000,000,000,000,000, or a million times a billion. ... The fact that it has taken so long for the human brain to evolve to such complexity makes the current single-generation, high-tech brain evolution so phenomenal. We're talking about significant brain changes happening over mere decades rather than over millennia." I could, if so desired (and, I gotta say, I am sometimes), the fact my current generation is so strongly at odds with the previous generations could be because we are more mentally "evolved." Hubris aside, it's an interesting bit to ponder. Even beyond social evolution and each era's metaphor for psychological well-being, our brains are even different on the synaptic level. This generation isn't just longing for connectivity through our devices but from each other more strongly than our previous generations even perhaps had concepts for. How is that not insane? Riots are burning in the streets of countries whose government of the old have tried to disconnect, and I mean that in the human and digital level, the way's people can connect with one another be through laws or religious ideology. In another essay from Digital Divide, Marc Prensky in "Digital Native, Digital Immigrants" coins the terms Digital Natives, the generations that have grown up in the internet (my generation and those after and perhaps rubbing up close before it) and Digital Immigrants, those from the generations pre-Internet. "Today's older folk were 'socialized' differently from their kids," Prensky says, "and are now in the process of learning a new language." It is clear that some people just don't want to learn a new language. In the past cultural paradigm shifts have happened in their own specific places in the world– a man standing in front of a tank, an African American girl walking through National Guard to get to school– over months of TV broadcasted news and papers. Now a movie released over the Internet causes countless terrorist attacks in hours and Facebook and Twitter updates unite a crowd in Tahrir Square to overrule a dictator. The Internet is incapable of being ignored. The resulting physical and mental change of this medium is huge and impressive and incredible. And it's the future's to take advantage of. 

PART FIVE: Happy New Year

So now it is January. All the Internet, it's vast sea of bytes and bits, JPEG's and embed Flash are once again at my fingertips, quite literally. The questions of what new neural pathways did I start forming while being off the internet move to the forefront. How much plastic did my neurons bend, so to speak? The conclusional answers for the end of this experience seem to be that I'm comfortably supine and I see the brain as a three pound mass of unstoppable force.

My unwavering search for new information without the ease of the internet at hand resulted in a term paper on a topic I decided on myself for a class of my own. I was inconvenienced on numerous occasions, be it from a lack of stimulus or the inability to find the damn movie times you stupid local paper. But with these inconveniences came a strange focus I wasn't able to notice as readily until now while I sit here and write this first bit after being connected again. The fluttering phantom limb is made whole again as the phantasmagoria of the experience fades back into reality. I can reach for the world of the Internet again and grasp it with a limb once gone, even if known all along to be temporary.