Consequence

Disconnection

After thinking it over for a day, I decided to “disconnect” from the internet, and computers in general. About a year ago, I realized that computer games are usually a waste of time. The hours that many people spend playing them could go towards learning a new language, training for a sport, cleaning up the house, playing games outside with friends, writing a book, and a myriad other activities. With this in mind, I stopped playing computer games. That was a year ago. Now I have realized that computers, those wonderful “time-saving” machines, and the Internet, the cloud and “repository of information,” do more harm for me than good.

Before disconnecting, here is what I did on the Internet:

1. Checked/sent email
2. read blogs about science/news/technology/general strangeness
3. checked Facebook (one of the worlds “evils”)
4. learned web-programming and worked on websites (such as this blog)
5. did research for school
6. looked for new internet tools/toys (such as face-morpher, buzzword, google-maps, implicit associations test, mixtape, carrot-mob, etc.)
7. played Travian
8. every once in a while, watched a video on YouTube or watched LOST on ABC.com

Before disconnecting, I asked myself if there was an alternative to everything I did on the Internet. In the cases of email and Facebook, I had snail-mail, telephones, and face-to-face conversations. Replacing reading blogs, I had newspapers, magazines, and the radio (I don’t have cable TV), and instead of watching videos or TV shows online, and playing Travian, I could do something more productive with my time. (Despite previous efforts to stop playing computer games, web-based games such as Wee-War, LineRider, and Travian snuck into my life)

Getting rid of those left web-programming, Internet tools/toys, and research. These, for me, were a bit more complex. I reasoned that if I was not going to use the Internet, I didn’t need to program for it (Web-programming knocked out). Web-based tools/toys such as Google maps had always fascinated me, and I often looked for new developments in fields such as this (search for some of the ones I mentioned if you’re curious). I decided that all-in-all, those were insignificant compared to what I could do off the computer (Internet tools/toys knocked out).

Of course, this left research for school. I thought along these lines:

Twenty years ago, kids in school didn’t need the Internet for research, why should I need it now?

“Well…” I thought, “schools have changed, and there is so much information available for free on the Internet that it is the easiest method of research.”
To tell you the truth, I still haven’t decided what to do about school-related research. I realize that summer will pass and I will go back to school, but I want to be able to stay disconnected for a year. I’ll see what happens but in the meantime, I am going to enjoy being off the Internet and away from the computer, writing my blog posts by hand, and spending my spare time setting up a dictatorship and taking over the world.

-Cypress, who wrote this all while sitting outside on a porch-swing.

PS. A big thank-you to Tim for typing this for me (and hopefully checking my spelling).