I find myself checking links to the SDMB, Facebook and one or two news sites repeatedly, sometimes for an hour or more: “nope, nobody responded. Nope, nobody responded. Nope, hasn’t updated” and I realize this is the 21st century version of just flipping channels repeatedly with your brain on autopilot. I occasionally watch a Youtube video, but no more than one or two at a time, as that gets old quickly too, I find.
So anybody else find themselves getting bored with the Internet? I actually checked out a book last week and have been slowly making my way through it.
When I start “flipping channels” between my few favorite web sites(good analogy, btw), I turn to porn. Forget about reading books, friends, etc. There’s always new porn.
What I’ve found, as the web becomes less a geek hangout and more about social networking, is that there are fewer sites about the things I like, and more sites about the things I don’t give a shit about, making it harder to be entertained.
I also don’t explore it much to find interesting things, like you used to have to do, and instead I wait for someone to point me to them.
When I was a kid the internet was genuinely exciting. I remember how cool it was every time the crappy dial-up modem was able to penetrate the mysterious ether of the internet and allow me access to all of its mysteries. My parents used a Mac BBS when I was 5 or 6 years old so even as a little kid I had the internet in a primitive form. This was when there was a whole underground fraternity of online Mac users and programmers making all kinds of quirky and bizarre games. Ray Dunakin is one of the few to still maintain an online presence.
The dumbed-down internet we use today is absolutely nothing like this internet of my childhood and it is way more boring.
There’s a little story that Mark Twain tells about going to a shop and buying a watch. There were hundreds of watches lined up and he thought they looked all the same, and ugly, and horrible. He finally picked one (thinking it was just as ugly as the rest) and walked out of the store with it, dissatisfied with his purchase.
Then, once he had it away from all the other watches, it became more and more special and more precious to him. The more he looked at it, and the more he studied it, the more its intricacies and uniqueness pressed themselves upon him.
I’m not sure if I’m recounting this story correctly - can’t seem to find it on the internet.
This is what I imagine happens in reverse a lot. The internet was amazing at first. I first had Prodigy, and I had a penpal! And I could play a game online! And I could read the news!
Next came my period with MUDDs and emailing my mom and boyfriend! And there was Yahoo, and then Google, and Wikipedia, and the Straightdope! And I could research homework assignments without flipping through a card catalogue! And I could talk to people in different countries in real time, it was so very exciting!
Now that stuff seems passe. Most of these websites have been around ten years or more. The new stuff that happens seems to be outside of what I care about. There’s only so much shopping one can do, only so much socialising with the extended family one can do, only so much reading about vaguely interesting things one can do (another problem is that although you can find out surface details of a given subject on the internet, you can’t pick up a really in depth understanding of any one thing, you’ve still got to buy the books and take classes). I’ve bought more books in the past six months than I have in years.
What’s the answer? I think it’s to limit your time on the internet to an hour or so each day, and find things to do with your life. That makes the time you have on it special, or at least as special as it can be.
I often find I’ve “run out of Internet”. I console myself with the thought that I have most likely run out of imagination and a sense of wonder instead.
I’m still bored and stultified, mind. Feeling that way now, to be honest…
Sometimes I run out of internet in the sense that I have nothing that I want to do at that moment, but I have folders full of urls that I need to read through, and the list is just getting longer. Some of these are put off because I know I dont have the time for them at that instant.
Yeah, the internet’s no longer dark, mysterious, and slightly dangerous (in a good way). I remember new websites having a huge “wow” factor. Making your own webpage was fun and exciting. Everyone was interesting and it was fun striking up a conversation with a random stranger half a world away.
But people finally learned how to make money off of the internet and now it’s nothing but a giant billboard of ads and Facebook status updates with the occasional morsel of interesting information here and there. Making good webpages is tedious work since there are so many standards you have to follow now.
I would have never thought I would say this when I was a teenage boy, but porn gets old too. Yes, there’s always new porn, but they all start to look the same after a while…
I agree with most of this, but also have to say that since the internet has grown to point where there’s not nearly as much “common ground” as there used to be.
As an off-the-cuff example, years ago there weren’t as many “Popular” webcomics; you had things like Penny Arcade and MegaTokyo (and Dilbert, although not strictly a webcomic) which a lot of one’s “nerdy” friends were likely familiar with and/or avid readers of.
But nowadays there’s so many of them (and many of them are very good, to be fair) that requires a fair amount of effort to keep up with them all. As an example (I know, anecdote, etc), not one of my RL friends or colleagues reads Penny Arcade; and it’s rare for there to be a comic which more than two of us read. So whereas we could once upon a time say to a fellow ‘Computer Person’, “Hey, did you see today’s [Comic]?” and get a reply in the affirmative (and discussion of said comic and its merits or lack thereof), now (at least IME), it’s more likely to be “Nah, I don’t read that; I read [Some Other Obscure Comic I’ve Never Heard Of]”. Conversation stalls on that point.
Also, I’ve noticed that as I get older, I actually have things I need to be doing in my adult life; I don’t have the time or inclination to go randomly looking for interesting stuff on the internet for the sheer hell of it. Now, if I’m after something specific, it’s great- but just thinking “I wonder if there’s a site which will translate the UN Declaration On Human Rights into Cat?” (and yes, I realise there probably is) isn’t something that appeals nearly as much as it used to.
Obviously you have yet to discover THAT website. You people who know what I’m talking about know what I’m talking about.
Long ago on the internet I could have my own web page. Everyone had their own web page. Everyone was on mailing lists and contributed things to the group’s web page. (Most people’s pages were ugly messes with too much junk on them, but mine was of course beautiful.) It was all anonymous, just like I like it! Then there seemed to be a shift. You could still have your own web page but it was fill-in-the-pre-formatted-spaces. I became grumpy because I didn’t want to follow their format. Now everyone (except me) has facebook which is pre-formatted AND tied to your real identity. Whatever happened to the good old days when no one gave their name on the internet for fear of axe-murderers? Anyway, I guess what I’m trying to say is I used to help create the internet, and now I mostly just consume it, which is sad.
I’m glad it’s not just me. Sunday afternoons always get me; I’m bored to tears, and the weekend’s almost over and I feel I’ve pissed it away (which I have, but well, that’s what weekends are there for). There ought to be so much interesting stuff to discover!
Have we had any ‘share interesting stuff you found on the net’-threads lately? I know there was a YouTube thread, but something more general than that; if not, perhaps I’ll start one…
For a long time I was really into message boards but lately all I see is the same old tired arguments, now with added nitpicking. This board is actually the last one I’ve stuck with after my last group decided atheists weren’t welcome unless we bowed to the superior wisdom of the Christians. I’ve joined a few more but it’s hard to pick up in a new place with no shared history.
Now I mostly come here, check FB once or twice a day, and Stumble. But even Stumbleupon has gone sour with 7 out of 10 hits being cute kitten videos. I haven’t found a way to filter those out. It’s not that I mind cute kittens; it’s just that my profile has my interests in science, history, technology, and art. I suppose cute kitten videos would be considered art, but it’s really not what I had in mind.
I do have tons of links bookmarked and no good reason why I don’t revisit them.
You’d think this would encourage me to get my fat ass out of the chair and go do something, but no, I keep clicking the same few sites over and over.
