Abstinence

Internet has become one of my main forms of communication with people. I work for a vitamin company doing research and development, and I feel like the company environment is dependant on the internet. I didn’t think that I would be able to complete this assignment if I tried to abstain from the internet on a week day. I constantly use e-mail at work for scheduling meetings, communicating with others in the office, and communicating with other employees who work off site. I also use the internet frequently to look up information in chemical journals. My work day has become dependent on the internet – instead of walking upstairs to talk to a co-worker, I send an e-mail. Instead of paging through a journal for an article, I simply Google it. I think that the internet has provided us with the ability to access huge amounts of information very efficiently, but it has also allowed us to become impersonal as a society.

I used this past weekend as my period of internet abstinence. When I woke up on Saturday morning the first thing I wanted to do was check weather.com to see what the temperatures would be like where I lived. I was planning on spending the day road biking, but first wanted to be sure that there would be no rain, high winds, or that it would not be to hot. With no TV the only options I had for obtaining a weather forecast was going into town and reading the paper, or calling a friend to look up the weather for me. I decided that the latter of these options would be cheating, and I felt like driving 15 minutes to get a newspaper was a waste of time. Instead, I just looked outside, got dressed, prepared some water bottles and got on my bike. I spent the rest of the day biking about 100 miles which would be one of my favorite ways to spend my free time. I think the internet is convenient, but I would much rather spend my free time outdoors or doing some sort of activity.

When I got home that night, I wanted to relax and turn on a movie. I realized that as a Netflix subscriber, I would not be allowed to watch any movies from Netflix.com as I have been accustomed to doing. For a few minutes, I contemplated using the internet anyway, but decided instead to read a book that I felt I never had time to read. It ended up being a great night, and I finished more than half of the book.

This assignment did not change the way I spend my free time, however it did give me a greater appreciation for the internet. I realized that I use the internet for so many things I take for granted. I use it to communicate when I do not want to make a phone call, I use it to buy clothes when I don’t want to drive to the store, and I use it to check the weather. The internet has become this source for everything and can be used constructively to save time and resources, but can also be a black hole where you can get lost. You could spend hours looking at websites rather than talking to other people or getting outdoors.