In today’s game of internet media pick-up-stix, I have to say that attention-deficit may have become an evolutionary imperative or at least something of an advantage. On getting home from work, I promptly get on the web to look at things I thought might be NSFW when I was browsing during the day (what else am I gonna do with a fifteen-minute break? I don’t smoke and can’t draw 100% of the day). This should by all rights take seconds. Instead I’m glued to the web for like two hours. Why? Let’s see:
- Catching up on the last several hours of Twitter (maybe getting on Twitter wasn’t such a great idea).
- Ernest Borgnine random fanfiction – humor via Twitter.
- Fun with art! (also via Twitter).
- Hipster humor is always appropriate, and in retrospect was SFW (but the original site linking to it wasn’t).
- Scott Kurtz of PVP fame is gearing up (with fanfare) for an “epic” holiday storyline. No irony – I’m actually looking forward to this.
- News: some random kid in Washington is evolving into a yeti robin hood. Also via Twitter. Catching a theme here?
- Reading news about a web service I hadn’t even heard of – possibly being bought by Google. Waste of time? Maybe.
- And some other stuff I’ve already closed the windows for and can’t recall the URL of. Adds another 16 items or so to this list.
This is not unusual. Twitter is responsible for most of it. And…uh…I may be addicted.
No, really. See, the great thing about the web is all the cool stuff. The crappy thing about the web is all the cool stuff takes a long-ass time to find. BUT – if you get on Twitter and find people who tweet about cool things on the web, then all you need to do is keep up with your Twitter feed and read the links that look promising. It’s a great time-saver! <- this was spoken aloud with irony, but you can’t hear it. So this is me telling you. Irony.
On the one hand, I no longer have to spend forever trawling the web for nuggets of entertainment goodness and general oddity, because it’s now delivered fresh and, er, steaming. On the other hand, the entry cost to find all those nuggets used to be higher, and I just wasn’t willing to invest that kind of time in searching. So I’d do something else instead, like read, or draw, or paint, or whatever. You know. Life things.
Now, Twitter has gone and lowered the cost of entry. I’m now part of the web’s in-crowd. Twitterati. I’m wired to the system, and it feeds me what I’m lookin’ for. I feel like I’m really on the pulse of things, instead of being on the outside looking in. And, months into this browsing technique, I’m here to tell you it really multiplies the time-sink effect of the Internets. Twitter has brought ruthless efficiency to the act of wasting time on the web.
I could fix this, reclaim more of my day, but…uh…er…. Yeah. That would mean quitting my Twitter habit. I’m not quite there yet. It’s just too good a source of news and obscure-but-useful information.
Maybe I need an intervention.