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I'm having mixed feelings about the internet these days.

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KvP:
None of what has been said so far has been incorrect, but none of it has been fully correct either.

It is true that it is quite easy to find yourself using the internet in such a way that your time is used inefficiently. This week my wireless modem burnt itself out and I was left internetless for 2 days. It was a weird feeling, like a prolonged power outage without any alternate sources of light. But I found that in that 2 days I had more time on my hands than I've had in months. I don't have time for television anymore these days, I used to watch reruns and new episodes of shows, but now I only really keep up with the Daily Show (usually several days after the fact) and 30 Rock, and the rest of my idle time is spent on the internet, several hours a day, at least 3 if you count the idle time spent at work.

Is that a waste of time? Some of it probably is, but it's no more of a waste of time than most everything else. Thinking in terms of opportunity cost, very little of what you do on any given day isn't wasted. It's certainly easy to think that internet time is particularly wasteful, but I think that's because it's spent sitting and staring, it looks useless. But when I'm here or on my other forums or on meebo or whatever it's just like attending a town meeting, or talking on the phone, or writing letters to people, or reading a newspaper, or taking a free class on the underground music scenes of the 60s/70s/80s/90s/00s.

We don't have much of a historical reference for this sort of thing, outside of a rather small community of venerable geeks the internet has only been a resource to people for the last 10, maybe 15 years. Can we really say with any certainty that the relationships we form out here are somehow less valuable than the ones we form in meatlife? I mean, I've gotten to know and broken contact with dozens of people on the internet over my time on the interscape. But I've gotten to know and broken contact with many dozens more in my meatlife. I do think that some of the people I've met will be friends with me for quite a long time, maybe for decades into the future. We read about people in the past having these relationships via post and that seems romantic and meaningful to us, how is this any different, really? It means something, it matters.

Think of internet dating. Many people reading this have met significant others via the internet. Have these relationships been any different than relationships formed through other means? There's this weird, not-entirely-rational stigma that attaches itself to internet friendships/relationships, like meeting somebody in a fuckin' bar is more legitimate than meeting somebody in a music forum. So, we can maybe make a blanket generalization that people who spend a lot of time on the internet are more awkward in meatlife. There's a lot of self-hatred in this, we kick ourselves because we weren't jocks in high school and we don't coast through the social landscape effortlessly. Why shy away from this resource?

Fuck that, embrace the internet. What would you do without the internet? Where would you be? Do you honestly think you'd be happier? Would you join a fuckin' fraternity or sorority and make friends that way? Join the gaming group at the local comic shop? Or would you be miserable and sullen all the time? Honestly I think if more people got over this self-consciousness they'd be a lot more content with their lot.

tl;dr I think all this bellyaching over the appropriateness of internet use is really about self-denial.

Jimmy the Squid:
See I really like the internet, especially this forum.
I'm not all that social, I kind of hate parties and almost everyone I meet comes across as stupid and not worth my time. Barring my housemate (who has been my best friend for about 10 years), my brother and my girlfriend (whom I met via another forum) I don't really have any regular meaningful interactions with other people because I really have nothing to say to them and when I do try to reach out I inevitably come across as a little too eccentric than people are willing to put up with. It probably sounds a little depressing but when I was in Boston and when we had the Auscon meetup I was incredibly happy because I kind of realised what it must be like to actually have friends.

Now I can go without the internet if I need to, but I tend to miss you guys after a while. The people I have met here are not my Internet Friends. They are just my friends.

Gilead:
The internet is fucking dope. It allows me to do cool art projects I couldn't otherwise do.

Lines:
I have a love hate relationship with the internet. I go through bouts of being really addicted to the internet, but this is mostly when I don't really get out much. Lately I've been kind of busy with work and social things, so all I do really is check my email, come here for a few minutes, or game for a little bit. Also, I finally got another library card, so my previous allotment of internet time is now taken up by reading. But really, I have felt in the past that I spent far too much time hanging around here, but I don't feel like that now.

Besides, I do happen to meet a lot of people on the internet, both from here and other social places as well. I feel that the internet is an extension of my social life and an opportunity to meet people I would have otherwise never met.

tania:
i spend a lot of time on this forum but i've always kept this part of my life secret on account friends tend to react very badly when i tell them i have met people from the internet and spend time on an internet message board. i try to maintain a healthy balance between my social life on this forum and in person in the sense that it supplements my social life rather than replaces it, but it's sometimes sort of painful to have to maintain such a huge gap between both groups because my friends here and my friends in guelph are equally important to me. i have met a lot of people on this forum, and of these, a few of them have been to my house or met my friends. whenever the subject comes up of how i met them, i always find myself lying and saying something like "oh, at a show" or "through another friend" - not because i'm deliberately trying to be hurtful, or because i'm even embarrassed of it, but because i know the truth is just going to get some incredible negative reactions and i really have no desire to deal with them. it's this really severe divide that, i think, contributes occasionally toward the unhealthy imbalances where do things like abandon the forum and don't talk to anyone here for ages to go concentrate on my "real life" instead, or leave my life here behind to hang out on the forum, subsequently neglecting my friends and everything else i need to get done.

lately this neat thing has happened where i've been spending more and more time with a few friends who i've realized are really wonderful and important to me, and i decided that if it ever came up in conversation i'd let them know about this part of my life. each of them essentially responded with an "oh, you're a nerd" or "oh, cool!" and then moved on immediately - not in the sense that they dismissed it but in that they genuinely didn't think it was a big deal at all. i think this maybe has more to do with the fact that they like me as opposed to the fact that they don't think meeting people internet is weird, but regardless it felt really great being able to say that without an overly negative response. this forum is a pretty big part of my life and i don't want to feel like i need to keep it secret and lie about it. i can only hope that throughout my life i'll meet more open-minded people like this who can help make this internet/meat life balance that much easier.

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