123 lines
5.4 KiB
Markdown
123 lines
5.4 KiB
Markdown
---
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created_at: '2013-02-22T00:24:33.000Z'
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title: The Net Is a Waste of Time (1996)
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url: http://www.nytimes.com/1996/07/14/magazine/the-net-is-a-waste-of-time.html
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author: mtrn
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points: 291
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story_text: ''
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comment_text:
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num_comments: 81
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story_id:
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story_title:
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story_url:
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parent_id:
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created_at_i: 1361492673
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_tags:
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- story
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- author_mtrn
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- story_5261676
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objectID: '5261676'
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year: 1996
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---
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In the age of wooden television in the South where I grew up, leisure
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involved sitting on screened porches, smoking cigarettes, drinking iced
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tea, engaging in conversation and staring into space. It might also
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involve fishing.
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Sometimes the Web does remind me of fishing. It never reminds me of
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conversation, although it can feel a lot like staring into space.
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"Surfing the Web" (as dubious a metaphor as "the information highway")
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is, as a friend of mind has it, "like reading magazines with the pages
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stuck together." My wife shakes her head in dismay as I patiently await
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the downloading of some Japanese Beatles fan's personal catalogue of
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bootlegs. "But it's from Japan\!" She isn't moved. She goes out to enjoy
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the flowers in her garden.
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## Newsletter Sign Up
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[Continue reading the main story](#continues-post-newsletter)
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[View all New York Times newsletters.](/newsletters)
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I stay in. Hooked. Is this leisure -- this browsing, randomly linking my
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way through these small patches of virtual real-estate -- or do I
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somehow imagine that I am performing some more dynamic function? The
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content of the Web aspires to absolute variety. One might find anything
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there. It is like rummaging in the forefront of the collective global
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mind. Somewhere, surely, there is a site that contains . . . everything
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we have lost?
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The finest and most secret pleasure afforded new users of the Web rests
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in submitting to the search engine of Alta Vista the names of people we
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may not have spoken aloud in years. Will she be here? Has he survived
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unto this age? (She isn't there. Someone with his name has recently
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posted to a news group concerned with gossip about soap stars.) What is
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this casting of the nets of identity? Do we engage here in something of
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a tragic seriousness?
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In the age of wooden television, media were there to entertain, to sell
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an advertiser's product, perhaps to inform. Watching television, then,
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could indeed be considered a leisure activity. In our hypermediated age,
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we have come to suspect that watching television constitutes a species
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of work. Post-industrial creatures of an information economy, we
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increasingly sense that accessing media is what we do. We have become
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terminally self-conscious. There is no such thing as simple
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entertainment. We watch ourselves watching. We watch ourselves watching
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Beavis and Butt-head, who are watching rock videos. Simply to watch,
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without the buffer of irony in place, might reveal a fatal naivete.
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But that is our response to aging media like film and television,
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survivors from the age of wood. The Web is new, and our response to it
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has not yet hardened. That is a large part of its appeal. It is
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something half-formed, growing. Larval. It is not what it was six months
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ago; in another six months it will be something else again. It was not
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planned; it simply happened, is happening. It is happening the way
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cities happened. It is a city.
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Toward the end of the age of wooden televisions the futurists of the
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Sunday supplements announced the advent of the "leisure society."
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Technology would leave us less and less to do in the Marxian sense of
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yanking the levers of production. The challenge, then, would be to fill
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our days with meaningful, healthful, satisfying activity. As with most
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products of an earlier era's futurism, we find it difficult today to
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imagine the exact coordinates from which this vision came. In any case,
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our world does not offer us a surplus of leisure. The word itself has
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grown somehow suspect, as quaint and vaguely melancholy as the battered
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leather valise in a Ralph Lauren window display. Only the very old or
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the economically disadvantaged (provided they are not chained to the
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schedules of their environment's more demanding addictions) have a great
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deal of time on their hands. To be successful, apparently, is to be
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chronically busy. As new technologies search out and lace over every
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interstice in the net of global communication, we find ourselves with
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increasingly less excuse for . . . slack.
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And that, I would argue, is what the World Wide Web, the test pattern
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for whatever will become the dominant global medium, offers us. Today,
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in its clumsy, larval, curiously innocent way, it offers us the
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opportunity to waste time, to wander aimlessly, to daydream about the
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countless other lives, the other people, on the far sides of however
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many monitors in that postgeographical meta-country we increasingly call
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home. It will probably evolve into something considerably less random,
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and less fun -- we seem to have a knack for that -- but in the meantime,
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in its gloriously unsorted Global Ham Television Postcard Universes
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phase, surfing the Web is a procrastinator's dream. And people who see
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you doing it might even imagine you're working.
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[Continue reading the main story](#whats-next)
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