I'm bored with the Internet. There, I'll say it. And yet, I bet you don't believe me. But let's take a look at my current browsing history. The BBC News website, BBC iPlayer, Amazon, YouTube, Netflix, Twitter, Facebook, Documenting Reality (yes, even after all these years, look after I've completed "Putrid Underbelly", I still pay it a visit), Peterborough United website, Stamford AFC website, a couple of job websites, Wikipedia, even Plenty of Fish, for fuck's sake. But on the whole, unless I'm researching for a book, those are about the only sites I stumble across on a semi-regular basis. I look at the news site in the hope that some big story has broken. I check Amazon to see if there are any startlingly fantastic new books I should buy. YouTube, I occasionally check for music videos. Netflix and iPlayer (I'm amazed crApple haven't sued the BBC for using a small "i"), out of sheer boredom. Twitter and Facebook, well, just for that social interaction (...). PUFC and SAFC because they're my local football teams. The job sites - well, isn't everybody looking for a new job? Wikipedia, not the world's greatest encyclopedia, but a good starting point for research - gives you ideas of what to Google for. And that's it. Well, okay, I confess, occasionally I'll pay a visit to my own website (that's www.shaunstafford.co.uk to you).
So, there's this massive source of information out there, and I'm using just a tiny, minuscule fraction of it.
What's the point of the Internet? Mostly, we still to what we're familiar with. Nobody really goes surfing anymore. You get your basic stuff from a handful of sites and you travel no further. Nobody goes off the beaten track. Christ, even the stuff I've checked out on Documenting Reality, some of that shit ends up on Facebook. A bit of shopping, that's about as daring as people get. See if you can get a tablet or a camera a couple of quid cheaper elsewhere.
I still recall those halcyon days of the Internet, where you waited an age for a page to load in, so you actually read it - the whole fucking thing - because you were on dial-up and it cost you money to download it. Now, if we can't find the information on the landing page within a few seconds, we're liable to say, "Fuck this," flick back to the Google tab and click on another link. Everything about our lives now is "fast". Fast food, fast shopping, fast dating. The POF people, they flick in and out of profiles, ditching most of them as though they're shopping for a pair of shoes. A sentence to capture the interest of the person reading. The same applies to books (if you haven't captured their interest in the first paragraph, you're fucked), and to music - why bother writing new stuff when the latest fast boy band can just churn out a cover version of a well-known classic, and churn it out fast ...
Why do we want to do everything so fast? Is it because we can sense our own mortality now. The Earth is billions of years old, but we're alive for less than a hundred years. Is that why we want to rush everything? Plenty of fish? That saying was intended to help a person who'd been dumped by a partner. "Ach, there's plenty more fish in the sea, pal." It wasn't intended to be used as a line for a dating site. "That's an ugly-assed fish - throw it back. There's plenty more of them out there."
Most of us, we're not running out of time. Not so much so that we can't waste a bit of time reading a book, finding something original to watch or listen to, or spending a bit of time actually getting to know somebody before we judge them.
Let me tell you, you're alive for eighty years. That's still a long fucking time.
Slow down, chill out ...
... surf the web again.
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