Disconnect
Taking Time Offline

1,904 words

All the things that they’re saying and doing
When they pass me by,
It just fills me up with noise.
It overloads me.
I wanna disconnect myself.
— Rollins Band, “Disconnect”

A solemn vow is occasionally proclaimed by those with an Internet presence; “I’m going to take some time offline.” Internet addiction does not just affect the young, and those of us of advancing years are often snared in the ‘net, flies in the World Wide Web. Perhaps going offline is the modern version of a cleansing ritual, a virtual Eleusinian mystery, digital feng shui. It is certainly instructive.

Due to moving house, I was recently without the Internet for a week. Now, I was already vaguely aware of a burgeoning online addiction, and this hiatus confirmed it. Of course, I am not gawping at TikTok, OnlyFans, or Reddit all day. With me it’s all media all the time. But still, I had found myself expending that time on pieces on currency exchange or Argentina, or watching American Congressional hearings rather than doing any real work, so perhaps this withdrawal, this informational cold turkey, would be a good thing. It’s time that is so important when you have an infinite resource and choice is unlimited. As Napoleon said, while lost ground can be recovered, lost time cannot.

Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD) is a moot point. A summary from Psychology Today is tentative concerning its existence as a clinical condition:

More a popular idea than a scientifically valid concept, internet addiction is the belief that people can become so dependent on using their mobile . . . devices that they lose control of their own behavior and suffer negative consequences. The harm is alleged to stem both from direct involvement with the device — something that has never been proven — and from the abandonment of other activities, such as studying, face-to-face socializing, or sleep.

The problem with medicalizing the Internet habit is that you may as well go on and put hobbies in the psychiatrist’s gospel, the Diagnostic and Statisticians Manual, or DSM V (currently). Oh, you spend a disproportionate amount of time ordering and reordering your collection of baseball pennants, huh? Well, you’re sick, but do we have the medication for you! Indeed, The National Library of Medicine (NLM) takes a positive clinical view of IAD with regards to its potential inclusion in DSM VI:

IAD ruins lives by causing neurological complications, psychological disturbances, and social problems. Surveys in the United States and Europe have indicated alarming prevalence rates between 1.5 and 8.2%.

Now we are operating on the biomedical model, as so often happens in psychological/psychiatric disputes, and what is at hazard is not the fragile ego of a TikTok fanatic, but the integrity of their neural system, and the NLM clearly feel steps must be taken: “[W]ith this paper, we intend to bring in practical experience in the debate about eventual inclusion of IAD in the next version of DSM.”

If there is such a thing as Internet addiction, it is in the same league as alcoholism and drug addiction in that personal choice inaugurates it. But alcohol is what it is, ditto heroin, cocaine, and the many opioids on which Americans in particular are hooked. There is no upside to excess unless you count short-term gratification. But the Internet is not monolithic in the same way as narcotics and booze. It can be used to benefit the person, as well as put them in thrall to mindless ephemera online. Is excessive use of the Internet a bad thing in and of itself?

It is difficult for the Internet generations to appreciate what a Big Bang it was for us boomers. For people old enough to remember the dreadful apparatus of the cassette tape, an MP3 was revolutionary magic. As for the Web as a resource, we are now in the science fiction novels we read as kids, master brains with the universe at our fingertips. The question of the retrieval of desired information always puts me in mind of Meyer Lansky, the mafia’s accountant, and his old cronies sitting out in the park arguing about this and that. Whenever there was a disputed fact, a boy would be dispatched to run over to the library and confirm or deny it. Now we have the same system, but with a billion boys and a billion libraries.

The British political class couldn’t stop talking about the Internet when it made its Gutenberg-like debut. They all wanted to be hip, seen at the cutting edge, and down with the kids. They still discuss it, but the political conversation now revolves around censorship disguised as “online safety” and uses children as a virtual human shield. The elites did not realize that the Internet was a very real gift to democracy, nor did they suspect that people would use it for activities other than pornography and shopping.

But, as noted, for a week I couldn’t use the Internet for anything. This was not some unfillable void in my life, however, as I always have plenty to keep me occupied. But I realized what a media junkie I have become. Without my caffeine-like fix of online news streams, I felt edgy and brooding. What was going on without my being informed? Where I am now, in the middle of a palm oil plantation in the foothills of the mountains, anything could happen worldwide and I wouldn’t know. Anything short of a nuclear war in the United States or Europe would have no chance of featuring on Costa Rican radio, and I may be the last Englishman to learn that Scotland has invaded. This is how films start.

Now that I am back with the Jetsons after my short sojourn with the Flintstones, I searched for “taking time offline,” thinking perhaps there might be some psychology papers or some such on the subject, but there was just a load of corporate/hippy drivel about reconnecting with yourself and improving your productivity. I hardly need to reconnect with myself — I’m not entirely convinced I was all that connected to begin with — and the Internet provides much of my productivity, so that fell on deaf ears.

You can buy Mark Gullick’s novel Cherub Valley here.

With no Internet, I read even more, a voracious reader in any case and with something of a backlog. George Grote’s titanic History of Greece would have been studied by Nietzsche at the Schulpforta, and I am riveted. Also, having recently finished a book of my own, I had more time to try to think about the next one. Also, I had time to think about online media rather than simply consume it.

Now, there are Mennonites who know more about information technology than me, but I have worked out a media dragnet all of my own, a personal news aggregator. On any given day, half-a-dozen English YouTubers will have isolated the stories from the United Kingdom’s press that I know will be of interest to me, and there are a lot of independent TV stations which produce high-quality content. This ability to assemble your own media platform is something the legacy media dread. They do not want to relinquish the megaphone, and news provision is not supposed to revolve around consumer choice.

The media complex is rattled by citizen journalists. Their narrative is uncontrolled, and they are not told which stories to cover or forced to cover them in an ideologically approved way. You will find ordinary people in their kitchens or bedrooms speaking truth to power far more meaningfully than the legacy behemoths. That is not to say that there is no mainstream media worth watching, and Britain’s GB News is making a fair fist of emulating America’s FOX News.

I don’t have any problem with infotainment, with the news plus a little pazzazz or, better still, humor. I grew up in an age where newsreaders were middle-aged men with combover hairstyles and pencil moustaches, so I welcome the new format. FOX News is well aware that hardcore news can have a showbiz delivery system with humor and glamor, but at the same time news can be dispensed by a bunch of ordinary English blokes who speak my language. That said, I am comfortable in a professional corporate news environment. As amiable GB News presenter Patrick Christys says in an ad for the station, “It’s not entertainment, but it’s that close.”

Like Robinson Crusoe, my exile came to an end and I was returned to civilization, which was pretty much as I had left it. In the end, my enforced absence from the Internet coincided with a no-news week. News falls into two categories: event news and squabble. There is always plenty of the latter now that commentary on social media is deemed newsworthy, and the only real instance of the former was Hunter Biden’s indictments. I welcomed the drug back into my life as if it had never been away.

In the end, I am a media junkie and I acknowledge my problem. But I don’t think I have an Internet addiction and, if I do, it is a virtuous one, like an addiction to sensible exercise or fruit. The rising generation, those unformed minds who will soon be running the public services, have a rather unhealthier set of compulsions, what the junkie community calls “a bad habit” to describe a fellow addict with what even they consider to be an excessive regimen. It is disheartening to see young people here, particularly girls, staring into their phones while lying on what TripAdvisor rates as the world’s twelfth-best beach.

Current generations of youth are going to grow up to be a very difficult prospect, either in the workplace or in social situations. By giving so much of their waking time to the virtual world, Gen Z have put sanctions on the real world, and that is where you learn to be a rounded person. COVID lockdowns will only have compounded this monomaniacal obsession. Dave Rubin told The Post the following concerning Gen Z:

They are digital natives but, between COVID and other factors, they have missed out on important inter-person social skills. Because so many Gen Zers are anxious and so many have trouble in non-digital spaces, even activities as simple as ordering food sometimes become things to be avoided.

“Digital natives” is a phrase that could catch on, if it hasn’t already, but digital natives can also be societal savages. For the young, uneducated as they are in any worthwhile sense, the online world is one in which they get what they want immediately, and their opinion is sacrosanct and shared unswervingly by those around them. That set of protocols does not extend to the real world, and particularly not to the workplace. You will have seen satirical videos of Gen Zers at work or being interviewed.

If the Internet is a drug, it is worth remembering that the ancient Greeks used the word pharmakos to denote both poison and remedy. This seems to fit the Internet, which can be used either for self-education or mindless frivolity, auto-didactic pursuits which will yield beneficial results for the user, or an accelerant for the stupid to achieve their nihilistic goal. Certainly, if you should have cause, or the desire, to be without the Internet for a while, you will discover its personal use value. But for now, the way the West and its rulers are tending, it might be a good idea to stick with the Internet while you still can.