Swearing off the web for a week
Fri 28 Apr 2006, 3:31 pm
I love the web. And I love the “biblioblogosphere.”
But I am getting repetitive strain injury from hitting command-R in NetNewsWire to refresh my RSS subscriptions. And I stay up late reading Metafilter or trying to get my Second Life avatar just the right shade of blue instead of doing the dishes. I read ten times as many words on a screen each day as I do on paper (at least! I wonder what the real figure is?). And the returns are diminishing.
So I’m swearing off the web for a week. I’m thinking of exporting my RSS feeds to OPML and deleting NetNewsWire to ensure I don’t backslide.
This week is/was TV-Turnoff Week, which isn’t really much of an issue for me. If you don’t count the kids’ videos I “watch” in the morning, I probably only watch three or four hours of TV a week. The web is another story.
So, starting tomorrow, I won’t be using the web for anything other than work. I’ll still write and answer email and will still be on IM as much as I usually am. But I won’t read blogs and I won’t post to this blog. I will check in on the comments every day to make sure the spam thing stays under control, and I might even write a reply in the comments. I won’t be bringing my laptop home from work unless I really need to do some work at home.
I will read a book or two and I will get more stuff done around the house and I will make more eye contact with my family. I might do some writing for the blog while I’m away; it has been a while since I wrote anything like an essay.
I fell a bit conflicted about doing it right now; it was great to have so many comments this week on the LCSH for fiction post, many of them from people who had never commented here before. In terms of page loads, See Also had its fourth busiest day ever yesterday. I hate to lose the momentum, but I’m sure it will pick up again quickly after a week. If I wasn’t making a conscious decision about this, a week’s absence would be nothing.
I’ll let you know how it went next week. Don’t do anything too interesting while I’m away.
Right now, though, I have to go–I have eight hours and thirty minutes of unapologetic web surfing ahead of me!
- License:
- File under: Blogs and blogging,Navel gazing
- Comments? 3
Wow! For someone who is not going to do web stuff, you sure are going to do, well, web stuff.
Sounds like you’re just taking a blog vacation, but you’ll still be writing for your blog.
Too many restrictions. Just turn off the computer for a week. ;-)
Oh, and good luck.
Comment by Steven M. Cohen — April 28, 2006 @ 10:02 pm
Ha! I like to keep things complicated, Steven.
I was trying to say that I’m not tired of the blog or the blogosphere, I’m tired of my own behavior, spending too much time in front of the computer. So I’m cutting back radically for a week, then trying to be more moderate when I return.
Comment by Steve Lawson — April 28, 2006 @ 10:16 pm
I find that I have the opposite of your experience. When I was a student I’d spend hours of free time at home surfing the web. But when I have a job that entails being on the computer most of the day, I hardly touch my home pc. And if you don’t count computer code, I probably read about as much on paper as I do on screen. But it’s nice to unplug once in a while, good luck with your experiment!
Comment by Nick Baker — May 5, 2006 @ 9:13 am