Apr 20 - The Dangers Of Spending Too Much Time On The Internet
By Stefano Blanca Sciacaluga
I was navigating through the sea of crazy shoppers (read: doomsday preppers) on a Saturday afternoon at Morrisons, trying not to hit anybody in the knees with those metal baskets - because I know how much that hurts - turning into the alcohol aisle to pick up some beers for a gathering that evening when someone walked past me, called me by my name and carried on. I looked back and made eye contact with his partner and her face was saying something along the lines of "I know you don't know each other", "I don't know you", "why has he done that"; and I shrugged and carried on shopping, trying to figure out if I knew the guy or not for the rest of the time I was there, which was quite a while.
Perhaps I did know him, sometimes people change quite a lot and in short periods of time but I'm almost certain that's not the case, I like to think I'm pretty good with faces. I guess what I do think happens is that it's fairly inevitable not to know me, soy el mas pesao. As in, I'm regularly on TV, or in the newspaper, or some magazine, or just all over the Internet, my face is on here every week or so; but to be honest I can't say I'm particularly happy about that. I don't like being the centre of attention, trust me, but it just so happens that I get involved in all sorts of things that put me in the public eye. Not to sound like I don't appreciate people who appreciate what I do, and them telling me, but just"eres un crack" can get a bit old when what I would ideally be after would be "eres un buen writer pero..." and a bunch of constructive criticism for me to work on and improve. In other words, the only reason I'm out there is to get my work out there, not myself. If that makes sense. I don't want my face to be popular, I want my art, and my photos and my writing to be popular.
I know nothing about psychology but I'm willing to bet - or at least I've seen from experience - the vast majority of creative types are introverts. And in this super technological day and age introversion and the Internet go hand in hand. Of course what that means is that introverts in the real world, appear as extroverts in the online world. Big time introverts get lost in the waves, real-life extroverts watch the waves from the shore, wetting their ankles or just half way up their shins and the regular introverts handle all the waves perfectly and succeed at surfing. These are the kind of people, like myself who are on every social platform, and in a way more engaged way than the regular Facebook-Instagrammers; these are the people who know some HTML, because what else is there to do on long web sessions in your mid-teens? The people who have at one time in their lives either written in a blog, or if you're a little younger than I am, reblogged the whole of Tumblr into your own private space on the net; or even regularly follows other people's blogs. I was recently migrating info from one web browser to another and realised, within the saved passwords section, how many web services I have signed up to in just the four or so years I've had my MacBook. From online shopping sites to social media platforms to forums to even something as ridiculous as Wikipedia. Yes, I have an account on Wikipedia, do I use it? Nope.
What tends to happen is I sign up for all these things, most of them I use a couple of times, some of them a few more times than that, once every few months, and then there are some I use ever day, like my combo of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat which I am constantly switching through. I have a very selective and tailored approach to what I'm getting out of these services, and more often than not I find that I follow a small select group of people across all those platforms. I sometimes feel like I see these people more than some of my close friends. I watch them wake up and go to bed and everything in between. I read their opinions on everyday things on their Twitter feeds, get slightly jealous of things they’re doing through their Instagram but then realise it's all a lie when I see the behind the scenes on Snapchat. Which doesn't surprise me why after a few drinks I decided to wish a happy birthday to someone I'm friends with on Snapchat and follow everywhere else but have never met and I am fully aware they live on the other side of the Atlantic and that a real life meeting would never happen.
I mean, it's got to the point where in reading other people's blogs or certain projects they've run I've become properly emotionally involved in something that has nothing to do with my own life and doesn't affect me in any way. But just as I end up opening up on here, or on Twitter, or on Facebook, or on Snapchat, other introverts of roughly my age - give or take a couple of years - all over the place also take to the Internet to come clean about things you might not be real-life vocal, but feel strong about. It gets to a point where you can start to think these people are actually your real life friends or that you at least know them, which is a little weird considering it's a pretty one-sided affair most of the time. But if it drove me to Snap a happy birthday...(there was a reply with some emojis, all positive)
The worst was a few weeks ago, where after some months of seeing a friend of a friend constantly through said friend's Snapchat, I saw them down the street and almost - if it weren't for a split second of level-headed thinking - stopped to say hi. I don't even know this person and I almost started an awkward conversation in the middle of the day. It was then that I realised I had come full-circle, I had become the stranger who said hi to me that afternoon in the busiest Morrisons.
But think of all the good to take from introversion and what introverts have done on the Internet, it almost makes these little Freudian slips worth it.
If you feel, however, that spending so much time on the Internet is being a hindrance to your developing as a functional human being take a moment to consider these steps I outlined some time ago here:
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