This post will have a slightly different subject from the previous ones, but eventually it more or less fits into the what's-new-about-me topic, so I won't bother. Don't worry, I'll write more about Cracow later.
Yesterday I finished reading a book.
Yesterday I finished reading a book.
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| forrás: klett-cotta.de |
It's titled 'Ohne Netz' which means 'Without Net' and it was written by Alex Rühle, a journalist from Munich, who works for the Süddeutsche Zeitung. The book is actually a diary about those six months (from 1st December 2009 to 31st May 2010) when he tried to live without using the Internet.
Although he states in the book that he could easily claim himself addicted to the Internet, he doesn't call this half a year a detoxication cure, rather an experiment. 'Ich will einfach wissen, wie es ohne ist, gerade weil ich mir ein Leben ohne Netz nicht mehr vorstellen kann.' ('I simply want to know, what it's like without it, just because I cannot imagine a life without the Internet any more.') Of course it's not simple to work like that as a journalist, but he often emphasises how much faster he can finish writing a text if he is not distracted by a new email and he cannot wander away among websites during his research. But the book is of course not only about his current articles and the occasional (usually forced) backslides. In his entries he thoroughly discusses in general, what effect the Internet has on us and how it contributes to the speeding up of almost every aspect of our lives.
One of the phenomenons to which he draws our attention is the changing of reading habits. The Internet requires a different kind of attention: we don't immerse ourselves in an online article, rather just skim it and then click on the next link. Most pages are shaped in a certain way to help this (for example the new, exciting(ly looking) titles often appear in the side column, next to the text we're reading at the moment) because the owners get the income from the advertisements based on the number of page views. This creates on the one hand the advantage that Internet users can very quickly and effectively find the relevant information in a given text, but on the other hand they're generally more scattered, even forgetful, and they often cannot immerse themselves in a book even if they wanted to. In connection with this, the author refers to an article by Nicholas Carr from 2008 (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/) where he writes: 'Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.' It's a very thought-provoking reading – I'm curious how many Internet-users would comment to it 'tldnr' ('too long, did not read' – a popular abbreviation on the internet, I had already considered it disappointing before I read this book).
But the disintegration of attention doesn't only concern reading. The news don't remain news very long either. I've read somewhere that a case, unless something new is revealed about it, usually remains in the public consciousness for only thirty-six hours. (Andreas Lubitz – does this name ring a bell?…) But some news don't even get enough attention for this short time. Rühle had to face this in connection with the failure of the climate conference in Copenhagen in December 2009. After he had heard about the indecision of the conference, he tried to discuss it with someone when he got to his workplace, but the collegue lost his interest within seconds and started to speak about a funny YouTube video instead.
Beside these the book also handles the topic of the speeding up of life, the changing of the concept of time. Rühle mentions that he used to struggle with the lack of time even when he didn't need to research in archives because the whole of the Internet was on hand to write an article. As a curiosity, he quotes John Maynard Keynes, one of the most important economists of the 20th century, who prophesied that the 21st century would be the age of free time with three-hour shifts and fifteen-working-hour weeks because machines would take over all the work from humans. But the people couldn't unattach their own lives from the speeding up of other processes around them, and although they're always 'saving time', they have got less and less of it. In addition to that it's increasingly hard to adapt to the increasingly fast changes, it's less and less possible to plan your future…
Despite these argumentations the book is not at all one-sided. Rühle discusses the reception of previous technical revolutions as well. According to him, some of the declarations from those times with only minimal changes could be printed nowadays as the text of an anti-internet brochure. My personal favourite was the part where he quoted the opinion of Gustave Flaubert and Victor Hugo (among others) about the trains, which started to appear in those times and with their diabloic speed of 30 kmph they made it impossible for the passengers to watch the landscape comfortably, they caused dizziness and nausea, and according to a medical newspaper they strained the brain and the eyes… If we always listened to those who argue against new phenomenons, we would still travel by horse-drawn carts. (If we had invented the wheel at all.) Progress is necessary, it's rather the ideal direction and speed we need to discuss.
Based on all these one could think that this is a gloomy book of deep, philosophical argumentations, but actually it's quite cheerful. It's full of anecdotes, self-depricating remarks and funny quotes from the author's children. All in all, it was an interesting and at the same time amusing reading.
Whilst reading I obviously started to think about my own behaviour and habits. I'm afraid, if we look at the definition of addiction quoted (from a textbook) by the end of the book, it fits me in several points… Sometimes I almost involuntarily check on my phone whether anything has happened on Facebook, in the evening I often 'get stuck' in front of the computer even when I planned for example to read instead, and I keep clicking and browsing aimlessly, although deep in my consciousness I know it makes no sense.
These symptoms have got stronger since I moved abroad and the Internet became my almost exclusive means of communication. It's typical that I hardly know the phone number of any of my classmates though I regularly chat with them on Facebook. I use my phone less often to surf on the Internet because I don't connect to the mobile network and we only have cable net at the dormitory, but for this reason when I find WiFi I connect to it as in duty bound, even when I'm not expecting any messages.
As for reading, I think nobody would have called me a bookworm in the last few years. I read much less than before and in shorter intervals. I often find myself 'scanning' rather than reading the pages, for example if I see an exclamation at the bottom of the page, my eyes automatically jump there because it's surely important and the previous paragraphs are not. Of course when I realised this (partly because of reading 'Ohne Netz'), I started to pay attention to thorough reading and I even took up the '2015 Reading Challenge' (http://9gag.com/gag/a8bQeNe/who-is-brave-enough-to-accept-it) – I'll see if it helps.
All in all I don't think I could carry through what Alex Rühle did. Even he asks himself (in 2010) if this experiment would be possible in two or three years because he already had to face immense difficulties looking for a working phone booth or fax machine in Munich. At our university almost every piece of information gets to the students via the Internet: the teachers send the exercises to be printed in email, give online quizes as homework, the Students' Representative Council publishes on their newsfeed that the rector has declared the Thursday before Easter a free day, and the Facebook group of our class is an essential source of information about every kind of test, homework and absent teacher, not to mention the USOSweb, the Polish cousin of the Hungarian Neptun. I don't see much hope to declare internet-abstinence – and let that one throw the first stone at me who has never said in a live, face-to-face conversation: 'I'll send it to you on Facebook'.
Although he states in the book that he could easily claim himself addicted to the Internet, he doesn't call this half a year a detoxication cure, rather an experiment. 'Ich will einfach wissen, wie es ohne ist, gerade weil ich mir ein Leben ohne Netz nicht mehr vorstellen kann.' ('I simply want to know, what it's like without it, just because I cannot imagine a life without the Internet any more.') Of course it's not simple to work like that as a journalist, but he often emphasises how much faster he can finish writing a text if he is not distracted by a new email and he cannot wander away among websites during his research. But the book is of course not only about his current articles and the occasional (usually forced) backslides. In his entries he thoroughly discusses in general, what effect the Internet has on us and how it contributes to the speeding up of almost every aspect of our lives.
One of the phenomenons to which he draws our attention is the changing of reading habits. The Internet requires a different kind of attention: we don't immerse ourselves in an online article, rather just skim it and then click on the next link. Most pages are shaped in a certain way to help this (for example the new, exciting(ly looking) titles often appear in the side column, next to the text we're reading at the moment) because the owners get the income from the advertisements based on the number of page views. This creates on the one hand the advantage that Internet users can very quickly and effectively find the relevant information in a given text, but on the other hand they're generally more scattered, even forgetful, and they often cannot immerse themselves in a book even if they wanted to. In connection with this, the author refers to an article by Nicholas Carr from 2008 (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/) where he writes: 'Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.' It's a very thought-provoking reading – I'm curious how many Internet-users would comment to it 'tldnr' ('too long, did not read' – a popular abbreviation on the internet, I had already considered it disappointing before I read this book).
But the disintegration of attention doesn't only concern reading. The news don't remain news very long either. I've read somewhere that a case, unless something new is revealed about it, usually remains in the public consciousness for only thirty-six hours. (Andreas Lubitz – does this name ring a bell?…) But some news don't even get enough attention for this short time. Rühle had to face this in connection with the failure of the climate conference in Copenhagen in December 2009. After he had heard about the indecision of the conference, he tried to discuss it with someone when he got to his workplace, but the collegue lost his interest within seconds and started to speak about a funny YouTube video instead.
Beside these the book also handles the topic of the speeding up of life, the changing of the concept of time. Rühle mentions that he used to struggle with the lack of time even when he didn't need to research in archives because the whole of the Internet was on hand to write an article. As a curiosity, he quotes John Maynard Keynes, one of the most important economists of the 20th century, who prophesied that the 21st century would be the age of free time with three-hour shifts and fifteen-working-hour weeks because machines would take over all the work from humans. But the people couldn't unattach their own lives from the speeding up of other processes around them, and although they're always 'saving time', they have got less and less of it. In addition to that it's increasingly hard to adapt to the increasingly fast changes, it's less and less possible to plan your future…
Despite these argumentations the book is not at all one-sided. Rühle discusses the reception of previous technical revolutions as well. According to him, some of the declarations from those times with only minimal changes could be printed nowadays as the text of an anti-internet brochure. My personal favourite was the part where he quoted the opinion of Gustave Flaubert and Victor Hugo (among others) about the trains, which started to appear in those times and with their diabloic speed of 30 kmph they made it impossible for the passengers to watch the landscape comfortably, they caused dizziness and nausea, and according to a medical newspaper they strained the brain and the eyes… If we always listened to those who argue against new phenomenons, we would still travel by horse-drawn carts. (If we had invented the wheel at all.) Progress is necessary, it's rather the ideal direction and speed we need to discuss.
Based on all these one could think that this is a gloomy book of deep, philosophical argumentations, but actually it's quite cheerful. It's full of anecdotes, self-depricating remarks and funny quotes from the author's children. All in all, it was an interesting and at the same time amusing reading.
Whilst reading I obviously started to think about my own behaviour and habits. I'm afraid, if we look at the definition of addiction quoted (from a textbook) by the end of the book, it fits me in several points… Sometimes I almost involuntarily check on my phone whether anything has happened on Facebook, in the evening I often 'get stuck' in front of the computer even when I planned for example to read instead, and I keep clicking and browsing aimlessly, although deep in my consciousness I know it makes no sense.
These symptoms have got stronger since I moved abroad and the Internet became my almost exclusive means of communication. It's typical that I hardly know the phone number of any of my classmates though I regularly chat with them on Facebook. I use my phone less often to surf on the Internet because I don't connect to the mobile network and we only have cable net at the dormitory, but for this reason when I find WiFi I connect to it as in duty bound, even when I'm not expecting any messages.
As for reading, I think nobody would have called me a bookworm in the last few years. I read much less than before and in shorter intervals. I often find myself 'scanning' rather than reading the pages, for example if I see an exclamation at the bottom of the page, my eyes automatically jump there because it's surely important and the previous paragraphs are not. Of course when I realised this (partly because of reading 'Ohne Netz'), I started to pay attention to thorough reading and I even took up the '2015 Reading Challenge' (http://9gag.com/gag/a8bQeNe/who-is-brave-enough-to-accept-it) – I'll see if it helps.
All in all I don't think I could carry through what Alex Rühle did. Even he asks himself (in 2010) if this experiment would be possible in two or three years because he already had to face immense difficulties looking for a working phone booth or fax machine in Munich. At our university almost every piece of information gets to the students via the Internet: the teachers send the exercises to be printed in email, give online quizes as homework, the Students' Representative Council publishes on their newsfeed that the rector has declared the Thursday before Easter a free day, and the Facebook group of our class is an essential source of information about every kind of test, homework and absent teacher, not to mention the USOSweb, the Polish cousin of the Hungarian Neptun. I don't see much hope to declare internet-abstinence – and let that one throw the first stone at me who has never said in a live, face-to-face conversation: 'I'll send it to you on Facebook'.
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