Goodbye, Internet (At Least for a Little While)

Next month, I’m going offline. For about 90 days or so, I won’t have access to email, the web, Facebook, or Twitter, and I won’t be downloading MP3s or eBooks. This website will remain static, as will my circa-1996 Geocities page featuring blurry JPEGs of Billy Corgan and lots of speculation on the inevitable awesomeness of Jackie Brown. This is no joke: The wireless will be disabled on my laptop and my iPhone, so if I happen to find myself wandering the apartment at 3 a.m.—a ritual usually stoked by insomnia and/or nostalgia—I won’t be able to soothe myself by watching blurry footage of adorable napping lemurs in a South Korean zoo. I’ll simply have to pick up a book—maybe Moby Dick or Dune or The Zagat Guide to Drowsy-Primate Footage. But the Internet won’t be an option.

I’m not retreating from the web as some sort of social experiment, nor as a journalistic stunt. I simply want to focus on some other projects, cut down the cultural clutter, and re-train my brain a bit. Ever since the mid-’90s, when I got my first modem, I’ve had a contentious relationship with the Internet: On the one hand, it’s granted me access to all the wonderful crap I could possibly desire, and allowed me to win AOL’s Star Wars trivia live-chat contest for five consecutive weeks (one of the many reasons I didn’t date in high school was because I spent most of my Friday nights in front of a PC, frantically typing “BOSSK!!?!”). On the other hand, the Internet’s slowly made me stupider.

Every hour, I’m inundated with articles, videos, and middling indie-rock albums, all of which I excitedly wade through for a few minutes or so before moving on to the next distraction. As a result, my brain’s learned to treat every new piece of information as ephemeral; it latches onto words and images for a few seconds, then drops them, knowing that they can be looked up again later. I feel as though I’m seeing everything, but learning nothing. This could be due to senility, of course, but I think it’s more likely the result of having spent way too much time refreshing a distended RSS feed and monitoring a glut of .RAR blogs. By pulling back, I’m hoping to revert my crap-consumption habits to the relatively moderate levels they maintained in early ‘90s, when I listened to one or two new albums a week (instead of five a day) and read the newspaper in-depth every morning (instead of half-assedly scanning Google News every quarter-hour).*

This doesn’t mean I plan on becoming a hermit. I’ll still be calling and texting, though I imagine most of my conversations will consist of questions like, “What’s the Internet doing right now? Anything? How ’bout now?” or “Have any cats become famous in the past 24 hours?” I also on plan on begging friends to read me a few barely coherent comments-section posts over speakerphone each night, so that I can peacefully fall asleep. It’ll be lots of fun, until it becomes a complete pain in the ass.

See you in a few months,

Brian

*The only cheats I’m allowing myself are my Kindle newspaper and magazine subscriptions, as those only arrive once a day or week, just like their dead-tree counterparts (plus, I don’t want to add to my recycling chores). I’m also going to keep Netflix going, but I won’t be futzing with the queue in any way, which means the highbrow (and presumably depressive) titles I’ve been putting off for years will finally arrive.