There's nothing on TV, so you get cable and you get dozens more channels with nothing on them. Maybe you try satellite with even more nothing. So you get a high-speed internet connection, because THAT'S where all the real news and fantastically creative user-generated content is.
There's also a billion channels of nothing. The Internet is a giant sea creature. You can only see a tiny bit of it at a time. It never fully breaks the surface of the real world, so you can't even take it all in from a distance. And an awful lot of it is just square feet of boring, slimy hide.
Even the stuff that's charming or fascinating gets old after a while. Unless you like to sit for hours in front of the computer, or you know exactly where you want to go, you can burn most of a day or night sifting for nuggets among the slag and sand. Then you can link to them so other searchers have an easier time finding them, but it's still all inside the mysterious box, glowing on the magic screen.
Time spent on the Internet is time not spent reading a book, drawing, painting or playing a musical instrument. It's fun to blather in a blog, but is it really going out to the world? No one is going to find a copy of it lying around somewhere and just happen to pick it up and skim a few pages.
I've read books I found in a roadside ditch. I've read printed matter found in just about any place you can imagine. So that, to me, is the real deal. The Internet is great, but sometimes you're just in the mood for reality.
No comments:
Post a Comment