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I have wasted my life (or, the Wikipedia thread)

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RedLion:
It's my 19th birthday today. Earlier in the day, I went out with friends, had fun, then came home and had cake, etc. But since then, and until now, I've spent the last 7 hours on Wikipedia. I kind of want to laugh at this, but I also feel like it's not healthy and am baffled that I could have wasted this much time reading internet articles about pointless shit that I could learn more about from reputable sources.

I didn't mean to be on it that long--I just went on to read the articles on Allen Dulles, just to brush up on his personal involvement in the CIA, as I'd taken a week long break from the history of the CIA that I had been reading, and needed a little refresher on some of the main players in its early history before diving back into it.

That lead to me clicking on links to operations carried out by the CIA overseas (which was stupid, as I would obviously read about some of these things more in depth in the book that I'm reading, and will be reading about the rest as I finish it up, so why read a cursory Wikipedia article about them?) After perusing numerous articles on those topics for awhile, I clicked on a link and delved into articles on Communism, even though my knowledge of that area, while not encyclopedic, is substantial enough that it shouldn't need to be reinforced by Wikipedia. After reading up on the intricacies and minutiae of the Marxism, I apparently felt it necessary to open up the link to "communist movements in France" in a new tab. I browsed that for awhile, then started going back in time in that tab, to the aftermath of WWI, then to the Second Empire and Second Republic, then back to the First Empire, where I spent 2 1/2 hours reading articles dealing with the Napoleonic wars, all topics on which, again, I really had no need to learn the details of, since I already grasped the basic occurrences in those periods. From here, I opened up a third tab on wars between the Russian and Ottoman empires from the section detailing how Russia's partnership with Napoleon led to border clash with the Ottomans. In that third tab, I read about 4 different Russo-Turkish wars, primarily focusing on the Crimean War.

In tandem with this, I was jumping back to the first and second tabs, in which I had started reading about Leninism and the Iberian campaigns of the Napoleonic wars, respectively. I spent a few hours going from Leninism to the article on Lenin himself, then to the Russian Revolution and the October Revolution, then to the Russian Civil War, and eventually to Stalinism, from where I started reading about the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. In the second tab, I eventually read most of the articles on every different Napoleonic war, then jumped to the Franco-Prussian war at the end of the 19th century, then jumped back in time again to read about German unification. At about the same time in each of these threads I reached the articles about the Uprisings of 1989--detailing the breakdown of the Eastern Bloc-- and the Uprisings of 1848--detailing the various anti-monarchical abortive revolutions in almost every European nation. 

At this point, the ridiculousness of what I was doing struck me. Why the hell have I spent the night of my birthday reading Wikipedia articles for 7 hours? I already knew at least the basics of all of these things, save for the Russo-Turkish wars, and if I wanted to learn more, shouldn't I read actual books on them? Then again, why would reading a book for 7 hours be more valid than reading similar information on the internet? All the information I've read in the last 7 hours isn't going to be retained, obviously. The brain can't lock all of that into itself in just one reading, particularly when it's on such wide-ranging and changing topics.

Has anyone else ever spent hours aimlessly surfing Wikipedia--or any other internet site? I mean, is this normal? I'm actually somewhat angry at myself that I spent so long on a single website.

Social Bacon:

--- Quote ---It's my 19th birthday today.
--- End quote ---
Shouldn't you have been out drinking?

But I think it's pretty normal. I do it from time to time when I'm out of books, usually I'll surf wikipedia until I find something interesting that I don't know anything about. Then I go buy a book on it. Repeat.

minorbird:
Are you kidding? This is how I spend a lot of my Saturday afternoons! At least what you were looking at was remotely interesting.
I guess its sort of exciting (for lack of a better word) at being able to jump between and around so many in interesting facts or accounts, on an infinite number of topics, just at the click of a mouse. Whereas with a book, you'd have to go borrow the books on the CIA, Marxism and Napoleon, and have to filter through all the crap to get to the interesting stuff.

Tom:

--- Quote from: Social Bacon on 28 Jul 2008, 01:03 ---
--- Quote ---It's my 19th birthday today.
--- End quote ---
Shouldn't you have been out drinking?

--- End quote ---

He's American.

RedLion:
I did have a bit earlier in the day with my friends, but yeah. I could hardly go out bar-hopping.

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