kistaro

Large swathes of the Internet no longer hold my attention as they once did. It is now pretty much only TVTropes that I stay up late reading, unless I'm behind on my LiveJournal Fiends List. Twitter is this lightweight and temporal and temporary thing, so I make no attempt to read back in that; my RSS feeds have slowed down because I've been thinning them out, trying to keep myself under 100 news-items per day. Google Reader has streamlined my Internet reading habits such that I don't have a set of sites I regularly check for updates- just the one, and that's pretty much the point of RSS.

I have no interest in Facebook, and most other venues of conversation have ground to a slow halt. Which is too bad, really, as conversation is what I'm here for; the Internet is a valuable platform for exchanging ideas, among its other uses. I miss baxil's former forum, among other things, but attempts to revive it aren't likely to work- attention spans just aren't there.

I don't think this is purely due to the Facebookization of the Internet. I am also inclined to blame the economy, draining peoples' time, energy, mood, and capacity for creativity and self-expression; a constant state of anxiety about financial security does not lend itself to philosophical thought. I hope the economy will improve, and slowly bring back peoples' states of mind along with it.

No matter the cause, the consequence is straightforward: I run out of things I have real interest in paying attention to much, much faster than I had previously. It's more likely than not that I am becoming jaded and cynical to the exchange of ideas; probably true, but it's an attitude I'm reluctant to reject when it's doing me measurable good.

It's given me quite a lot of time back. I'm reading again. I'm starting to actually get into my massive collection of unplayed games from the last handful of Steam mega-sales. Video gaming is hardly the pinnacle of cognitive achievement, but it's better than just zoning out, browsing various sites but fundamentally psychologically disengaged, as otherwise claims too much of my time. Heck, it's a distraction from itself; I'm several months out of date on Homestuck because I kept forgetting to get back into it, not because I didn't want to, and am only now catching up. It's media I'm actually interested in, instead of driven by this strange compulsion to read everything.

And it's that compulsion that's drained a frankly massive amount of my time for the last several years. My irrational, self-destructive fascination with the Internet is finally fading, and good riddance; I've already started to balance my time (much) better as a result.

(Today: garage organization.)

I've migrated to DreamWidth. The original post is at http://kistaro.dreamwidth.org/477825.html. View comments at http://kistaro.dreamwidth.org/477825.html#comments; go ahead and use OpenID to post your own, or you can comment here.