I decided I was addicted to Fæcebook* so I resolved to take a three-week break from it—sort of a New Era's resolution. And, man, I am more addicted than I even knew. I find myself sitting in front of my computer with my fingertips just barely touching the keys, waiting for I don't know what, feeling like the cliché of the older person who walks into a room and then freezes and says, "Wait a minute...why did I come in here?" The experience is maybe 40% funny, 60% scary.
Only when I forbade myself to go on did I realize just how insanely much I went on. I'm not even talking about doing stuff on Fæcebook: the reason I stopped was that I'd been going a little overboard with it lately because of the election (posting articles, writing "status updates," that sort of thing), but I see now that even when you don't "do" a thing on there, there's an incredible draw just to go on and...what? There's the stalker element to it that plenty of people have commented on—checking out people you know, people you sort of know—but that's not the essence of it, at least not for me. What I find myself doing is, I'll finish writing an e-mail or reading an article or something, and then instead of just closing my browser and getting up and leaving the computer—or maybe, oh, I don't know, working?—instead of that I have what's practically a bodily impulse to just quickly, casually flick over to Fæcebook. It isn't even that I want to see what so-and-so is up to: that at least would have a social element to it, lame in its expression or no. I'm afraid that what really drives me—and what makes it an actual addiction?—is that it ends up being just something to do.
Even as I'm writing this now, some part of my brain is saying, "Hey, you just finished a paragraph: let's just flip over to Fæcebook."
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In a way what we're talking about is really internet addiction, with Fæcebook nothing but a particularly insidious instance.** What makes Fæcebook so addictive, I think, is the continual updating, yours and theirs: there is always something to do or see. It's always seemed to me that internet pornography's dirty secret is that the sex is just an excuse for ever-updated, endless, inexhaustible content. People aren't addicted to dirty pictures: they're addicted to internet content.
And internet addiction itself is surely just an aspect of something larger. As Pemulis says about drug addiction in Infinite Jest, "If you're addicted you need it...and if you need it what do you imagine happens if you just hoist the white flag and try to go on without it, without anything? ... What happens if you try and go without something the machine needs? Food, moisture, sleep, O2? What happens to the machine?" (1065). Pemulis advocates replacing one substance with another; DFW saw (I think) that Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step programs were basically the replacement of a substance with something equally life-consuming...but one way or another, the point is that an addiction is not some free-standing problem that will disappear and be replaced by total mental health upon removal of the addictive stimulus. Maybe what internet addiction really comes down to is a drive to focus on something other than life, a hunger for withdrawal and escape, a need to avoid really being. It's become something of a cliché, but as DFW points out in Infinite Jest, something can be true and a cliché: we're afraid to be alone with ourselves. How often do you spend even five minutes not watching TV, not checking e-mail, not talking on the phone, not reading, not planning the day...not thinking about "vulgar" things like politics, the world, your family, your personal life, religion... How comfortable are we just being ourselves? Not very fucking much, is how. Maybe what we need to replace our addictions with is...life? Not life as in "having a life" but life as in what you've got whether you "have a life" or not, life as in what you'd have if you were stranded on a desert island for years or what you have when you're alone in a room with nothing to occupy or distract you. Reality, call it?
I'm also quitting drugs, but that's easy.
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* I write Facebook with an Æ because I am six years old.
** Side note: can everyone please not refer to your Fæcebook profile as "your Fæcebook"? It's not a book, and it isn't even a Fæcebook. The reason it's called what it's called is that it started as a college-only thing, and colleges tend to have facebooks with pictures of all the people in your class: in other words, the whole fucking site is a facebook; your page is part of the facebook. OK? Please? ... Actually, what am I saying? Jesus. Call it whatever the fuck you want.
2 comments:
Yeah I've been grappling with this moment recently. The moment of release when you just let go of your train of thought and collapse into the arms of the internet, which is so much more loving and reassuring than your work. I've been interpreting it as a sort of existential breakdown that manifests over and over in this tiny way. I keep trying to understand this problem in psychological terms, but so far it has resisted meaningful interpretation in that framework.
I'm getting really bored of your inaccessibility. This would all be easier said face to face.
Psychological terms: "the central task of man is to be fully born" (see this in terms of the individual or the society), which is easily connected to the relationship one has with one's parents and with one's society, a question of accepting responsibility for oneself (being fully born) versus rejecting it in terror (retreating into the womb) and instead finding substitutes (e.g., political ideology, sadomasochistic dependency, sex/drugs/rock'n'roll, Fascist leaders, God); as long as we're online, our lives are on pause and we can let others do our thinking for us: you say "arms of the internet," which I like, but isn't it almost more like a kind of amniotic floating...?
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