Bidisha, writer and critic

The internet is definitely affecting the way I think, for the worse. I fantasise about an entire month away from it, with no news headlines, email inboxes, idle googling or instant messages, the same way retirees contemplate a month in the Bahamas. The internet means that we can never get away from ourselves, our temptations and obsessions. There's something depressing about knowing I can literally and metaphorically log on to the same homepage, wherever I am in the world.

My internet use and corresponding brain activity follow a distinct pattern of efficiency. There's the early morning log-on, the quick and accurate scan of the day's news, the brisk queries and scheduling, the exchange of scripts of articles or edited book extracts.

After all this good stuff, there's what I call the comet trail: the subsequent hours-long, bitty, unsatisfying sessions of utter timewasting. I find myself looking up absolute nonsense only tangentially related to my work, fuelled by obsessions and whims and characterised by topic-hopping, bad spelling, squinting, forum lurking and comically wide-ranging search terms. I end having created nothing myself, feeling isolated, twitchy and unable to sleep, with a headache and painful eyes, not having left the house once.

The internet enables you look up anything you want and get it slightly wrong. It's like a never-ending, trashy magazine sucking all time, space and logic into its bottomless maw. And, like all trashy magazines, it has its own tone, slang and lexicon. I was tempted to construct this piece in textspeak, Tweet abbreviations or increasingly abusive one-liners to demonstrate the level of wit the internet has facilitated – one that is frighteningly easily to mimic and perpetuate. What we need to counteract the slipshod syntax, off-putting abusiveness, unruly topic-roaming and frenetic, unreal "social networking" is good, old-fashioned discipline. We are the species with the genius to create something as wondrous as the internet in the first place. Surely we have enough self-control to stay away from Facebook.

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Failing to learn by experience	\|

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