

The end of my Internet diet experiment - Swizec
http://swizec.com/blog/the-end-of-my-internet-diet-experiment/swizec/2507

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daemin
This was an interesting experiment, and while travelling I've done things
similar, especially where a connection is spotty or non-existant.

However when it was mentioned that viewing 'useless' sites on the web was
replaced with watching TV I remembered something that Clay Shirky said in his
latest book. Where before the Internet a lot of people wasted most of their
day watching TV (soap operas), they now used the Internet. Collecting all of
these hours 'saved' from millions of people contributed to great projects such
as Wikipedia. So it makes me think if limiting access to the Internet for
yourself is necessarily a good thing, especially since the replacement
activity is something passive like watching TV.

So perhaps the answer is to limit mindless passive activities to minimal hours
a day and otherwise try to remain productive and doing interactive things.

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Apocryphon
As a kid, I ended up reading a lot of "mindless" books in my spare time-
novels, Choose-Your-Own-Adventure gamebooks, a lot of fiction in general. I
wonder if replacing "useless" sites or shows with reading materials (magazines
and newspapers in addition to books) would be any better. Reading non-
electronic text is less dynamic than TV or the internet- at the very least,
that could prevent further atrophy of one's attention span.

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daemin
Now is that because books and other paper literature is considered to be a
different beast than the written word on the Internet? Or are we just
accustomed to such old media while we still need half a generation to get used
to text delivered electronically.

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ubuntufreak
That was really inspiring for me You did a great job. I like that sentence you
said "In that regard the internet is seriously annoying. Pulls you in like a
drug, wastes all your time and doesn’t give anything back in return. The
internet does not love me as much as I do her"

Thanks for sharing your experience

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Apocryphon
I'm very glad this was posted- too often HN gets the first initial provocative
post and it receives a hundred upvotes and comments while the followups that
explain and clarify the original story go ignored. I commend you for your
experiment, and am currently working on a similar diet that can work for
myself.

