Internet Abstinence

I have never thought of myself a big internet user. Quite oppositely, I would say that I am only a word processing and emailing sort of person when it comes to computers. I would say this in a haughty tone, as though my lack of computer related capabilities made me somehow more pure than others. My experience at abstaining from then internet, therefore, brought much to light about how often I use the internet, and consequently, that I am a liar.
I use the internet for school, whether it is for research, communicating with my professors or checking my tuition balance. I also use the internet for work. I am an accounting assistant and often need to look up government documents and tax laws. Of course we can’t leave out all the office bonding that takes place while we stand around my boss’s computer and watch funny video clips people send him in emails. Recreation wise, I used the internet for email and, more recently, Facebook. I also pay my bills and monitor my bank account online. This substantial paragraph obviously refutes my previous paragraph. I am not just an email sorta girl. I use the internet so often that I had to pick my 24 hour period in which I was to abstain from the internet very carefully. I chose Wednesday to be my day without the internet, a day that was to start at 9 o’clock in the morning (after I finished everything I needed to do online of course.)
Wednesday morning arrived, as I’m sure you all noticed, and I, having just finished my emailing, facebooking, checking of balances and doing nothing, I cut myself off from the internet. What I was not prepared for, however, was how often I referenced it. Any question that pops into my mind I search for on Google. And this, not the emailing, researching and facebooking, is why my internet cut off time didn’t actually occur until eleven. Questions from, how long has Ben Stiller been married (nine years), how do you make bread bowls for soup (I didn’t find a recipe easy enough) and what, exactly is that spot on my toe (I don’t know) kept me coming back to the computer. I had not realized how often I use the internet to answer my questions. So long are the days of pondering, why when there is Wikipedia? When I finally stopped meandering to the computer to ask it questions, and sat down to type up a response for English, I unconsciously clicked open the internet. That, if nothing else, shows how often I use it.
Once the initial break was made, the rest of my day carried on without disruption or even the need for the internet. I did not feel it inhibited my ability to communicate (after all I still had my cell phone) nor did it ruin my day. I had plenty of other things to do; I didn’t need to look up all the movies Elizabeth Taylor has been in, I was busy enough. After reading the first chapters of Online Communication and Technopoly, I began to think about my internet usage, how it affects my personality and ways of communicating. The affect of computer mediated communication on my personality was easy to see; mediated communication makes me wittier. Because I am communicating through a third party, in this case a blog, I am able to think through, revise, look up words in the thesaurus and reference Postman and Wood and Smith. This communication would drastically change if I were talking directly to someone and not through technology. If I were talking directly to someone, I would not have to time to think through witty and intelligent answers, I would have to respond immediately and rely on my thoughts for information. In the academic world especially, mediated communication is used for relaying what information students have learned, and how they have applied it. Think of how different learning would be if we gave memorized speeches, as Postman describes the ancient Greeks doing, instead of writing papers. Think of all the material we would have mastered. This brings up the question then; does technology make us any smarter? Individually, I think it has not. As a society, it has propelled us to know things we would have never figured out without the aid of computers. The properties of electrons, for instance, would not be known if the subject was not researched thoroughly with the help of technology.
A day without the internet, therefore, was a good experience. Although I never learned how many movies Elizabeth Taylor has been in, I did learn how the internet impacts the way I communicate and how this, in turn, affects not only how I communicate with people, but how I learn. If there was no internet, I would talk to my doctor about the spot on toe, I would look up recipes for bread bowls in a cook book, and I would probably not care about Ben Stiller’s wife. Without the internet, we would revert back to a more personal form of communication: talking. We would spend our time writing thought out letters, reading and interacting with one another face to face. We would have not lost the art of debate or conversation. But would we be happier? Are we happier now?

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