It is dangerously easy to become anaesthetised to life, to drink the nectar of convenience and settle, like a human-shaped rug, atop the nearest horizontal surface. To trade live performance for reruns. Modern adulthood all but demands such behaviour; work all day, then let your molecules drift until morning, too distracted to stoke the fire in your eyes. You may not even notice it happening, since it has become so smoothly integrated into our existence. We’re aware of the threats posed by crass consumerism and the endless need to obtain more and more meaningless objects – Fight Club taught us well! – but what of those wrought by our new and ever-expanding ability to consume data?

The issue is this: the Internet is a well with no bottom, and we’re pennies that a handful of brilliant engineers tossed in a decade and a half ago. Its nourishing glow is with us wherever we are, flowing forth from desktops and cell phones and laptops and screens hung from arbitrary walls. This accessibility is an incredible tool when used appropriately, but humans are generally not creatures of moderation. If you can peruse websites and deal with your email for half an hour a day and then get on with your life, that’s great – but is anyone actually doing that? I haven’t managed such a feat in years, and that bothers me. It has recently started to bother me enough that I feel a pressing need to figure out how to roll back the clock.

See, I discovered the Web in 1996, and back then, there was a cap on the amount of random information a person could absorb in a day. There weren’t many easily accessible sites that suited my fancy, and the ones I found had a limited supply of content. It was simple enough to check for new information and then move on. Starting in 1998, my biggest distraction was the MUD I played and, later, ran; that game devoured my days. However, my time there was split between conversation and creation, both of which were filled with ideas. It was not a passive experience, and my interactions with players and staff kept me working on new features pretty much constantly. It occupied the vast majority of my online time from 1998 to 2004, but the ratio of ADP to other things changed along with the structure of the Internet. When I went to grad school and stopped contributing to the MUD in 2004, “other things” took over completely.

While I’d been writing code and designing worlds for people to get lost in, the well had been deepening. Google opened the field of websites so much that it became impossible to see the end in any direction, and aggregators made it even easier to track any number of subjects. No niche was too obscure. (Ten million people love ferrets in party hats just as much as you do! Hey, check out this website that contains nothing but photos of Margaret Thatcher with pandas! Oh my god, a Tumblr devoted to inappropriate footwear!) There was so much to see and learn; every story was accompanied by a dozen useful links and a hundred potentially interesting comments. I could spend all day discovering new topics, and I did: particle physics, American political movements, and more cancer research than you could shake a stick at. (To date, there are no interesting articles about the use of shaken sticks to treat cancer, but give it some time…) I felt smug about my choice of content – no celebrity gossip, no reality television, no YouTube vlogs – but over time, it has dawned on me that it doesn’t matter how high- or low-brow the information is. If there’s too much of it, it must be displacing something else.

The vast majority of my time online is now spent consuming; the target is content, not food or objects, but it’s the same idea. Every minute I spent reading is one I don’t spend creating, and there is enough out there to ensure that I can read for the rest of my life if I’m not sufficiently vigilant. The iPhone in my pocket whispers secrets wherever I am; the laptop travels to the deck as easily as its dead-tree analogue does does. Sure, I’ll do something else, just as soon as I find the bottom of this well. Hey, at least it’s not television!

Those are just rationalisations. Passivity is to be fought, because it spreads far too easily; we’re witnessing a Fibonacci Sequence of meme reproduction. I want to regain my old ratio of information in to information out, but it seems so much harder to do now. How do you ignore the siren song of the entire world’s store of knowledge long enough to contribute your own?

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