5 ms·
This was an interesting experiment, and while travelling I've done things similar, especially where a connection is spotty or non-existant. However when it was
by daemin 15y ago
This was an interesting experiment, and while travelling I've done things similar, especially where a connection is spotty or non-existant.
However when it was mentioned that viewing 'useless' sites on the web was replaced with watching TV I remembered something that Clay Shirky said in his latest book. Where before the Internet a lot of people wasted most of their day watching TV (soap operas), they now used the Internet. Collecting all of these hours 'saved' from millions of people contributed to great projects such as Wikipedia. So it makes me think if limiting access to the Internet for yourself is necessarily a good thing, especially since the replacement activity is something passive like watching TV.
So perhaps the answer is to limit mindless passive activities to minimal hours a day and otherwise try to remain productive and doing interactive things.
- Apocryphon 15y agoAs a kid, I ended up reading a lot of "mindless" books in my spare time- novels, Choose-Your-Own-Adventure gamebooks, a lot of fiction in general. I wonder if replacing "useless" sites or shows with reading materials (magazines and newspapers in addition to books) would be any better. Reading non-electronic text is less dynamic than TV or the internet- at the very least, that could prevent further atrophy of one's attention span.
- daemin 15y agoNow is that because books and other paper literature is considered to be a different beast than the written word on the Internet? Or are we just accustomed to such old media while we still need half a generation to get used to text delivered electronically.