Excessive Internet use should be defined not by the number of hours spent online but "in terms of losses," said Maressa Hecht Orzack, a Harvard University professor and director of Computer Addiction Services at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., founded in 1995. "If it is a loss [where] you are not getting to work, and family relationships are breaking down as a result around it and this is something you can't handle, then it's too much."
Of course I'm in the lucky position that being on-line actually is my work. Which means that I could make the argument that requiring me to come in to the College physically means I do less work. But it's more than that. My family and friends are spread all over the world yet I correspond with them on a regular basis via chat or Skype. For me it's all positive and no negative. Did I say I was lucky?
Resistance is futile, it is useless to resist
I think we're really at the very beginning of where the Internet is going to take us. For a glimpse of the future I highly recommend Charles Stross's novel Accelerando which is freely available online (despite being a best seller in hard copy--take a lesson publishers). In one scene, Manfred, the main character of the book which is set in the near future, is plunged into a crisis when he is mugged for his 'glasses' (actually the interface between his mind and the computers which he uses to connect to the web) and finds himself literally unable to think because so much of his 'mind', his knowledge and processing ability, actually exists outside his skull. I haven't gone that far obviously; but still there is an eerie resonance to this.
When I want to know something more often than not I hive off a mini-mind of sorts:
If it's a basic informational point I do a simple Internet search, which is to say I send out a little digital agent which collects all the information available, orders it in accordance with a certain logic set by me (usually the Google default), and presents it.
If it's a more complex thing I may search a bibliographic or other database such as IBSS.
And if it's really complex I might fire off a question on any one of a number of ongoing discussion forums or email rings which I'm a part of and see what comes back.
Essentially this is distributed thinking. Nothing new there you say. We did all those things, more or less, before the Internet. True, but now we do it faster, much faster. If you are connected then I can safely assume that if you do not know, say, the date of the Battle of Poltava, the size of the Chinese defence budget in purchasing power parity, or the basic outlines of the career of Field Marshal Slim, or whatever, then in a few minutes you will. Essentially, everyone is now that boring uncle who knew all the trivia about everything.
But there's more to it still: increasingly, I find myself using Google desktop search to find things on my computer which I myself have written or archived, which is to say I use it in a sense for processing my own thoughts.
Now clearly this is rudimentary stuff but the fact is that we're already mixing our consciousness with machines. At the present time the part of you, or me anyway, that works outside of my skull is a minuscule fraction of that which works inside. Yet given that computers are evolving many orders of magnitude faster than human beings, getting faster, more powerful, and more connected all the time, how much longer will it be before the 'meat-me' is the lesser quantity while the 'digital-me' does all the intellectual heavy-lifting? In other words, in a couple of decades we may be at a point where going offline will feel something like being thrust into a sensory deprivation chamber or having your head pounded with a rubber mallet.
Minus all the hardware (for rubber fetishists only, I reckon) I don't think I'd mind being this guy too much.
Bring it on, I say. Borg me.
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