Progress Report

Today marks eight days of semi-webstinence, and here is what I have learned:

1. The number of caveats has expanded, but all of them have remained within the spirit of the original goal. I've added banking and weather websites to the permitted list, and I've also made a few exceptions to help out friends. The most potentially criminal exception was helping somebody shop for a brand new Mac. You can do a lot of geeking out on Mac's website, as well as a fair amount of drooling over the massive amouts of computing coolness contained therein, so there was a little bit of aimless time wasting that went on. But when a friend asks your opinion, you want to provide quality information.

2. I'm a little surprised but not totally shocked by this, but most of the stuff I'm missing, I don't miss at all. I have not once veiwed a web page from ESPN, Fox News, MSNBC, Slate, or any of the other handful of information sources on which I typically feast. I'm sure that some interesting articles have come and gone, but in my bliss, I am not sad for their loss. Additionally, I am not completely out of any loops thanks to my faithful intake of that ancient device, the daily newspaper. So the lack of daily information servings is down a bit, but I don't think there is any substantial decrease in the quality of stuff that I know.

3. Interestingly, in eight days I have been e-mailed / IM'ed a total of about eight unrequested links. (Thanks, Wyatt, for being my interweb slave and doing the Pogues research from yesterday - and on your birthday, no less! Such friends have I!) Three of those were blog postings. I'm not sure if this means that people just tacitly declined my request to be fed interesting articles, or if people are not finding articles worth sharing. I'm going to guess it's a lot more of the former than the latter. Either way, though, it's worth noting that in eight days, the internet has produced almost nothing that you feel like sharing with me. And again, I'm not really missing what you're not sending me.

4. The thing I do miss the most is the instant access to information. At some point in the very near past, you had to wait to learn the answers to things. No longer is this the case. I can find the stats for the 1984 Cleveland Browns run defense or the name of the key grip in Weekend At Bernie's II in under 30 seconds. Being a person whose attention span works like a group of especially disorganized lottery balls, I frequently find myself wondering stupid stuff like this, and I miss the ability to bring said information immediately to hand. Of course, in about 80% of those cases, the information is pure trivia, so I'm probably doing fine without it. But then again, I do like me some trivia.

So that's the story. This hasn't been at all painful. Personal productivity is up, blogging has increased, the dissertaion progresses ever faster, and the level of useless information is down. I'm not going to promise that this will stick or anything, but it could serve as a demonstration that at least some judicious curtailing of my interwebbing activities might be in order. We shall see.