Dealing with the Devil

I love the internet. I love being able to quickly find information on just about any topic. I enjoy reading blogs, listening to podcasts, reading news articles, etc. Having the world at your fingertips is truly one of the wonders of our age. I'm sure many others echo my sentiments. But there some things we don't usually mention in our praise of the web. Like sitting down to look up a particular piece of information, and walking away an hour (or more) later having jumped twenty topics from where we started. The hypertexuality of the internet is often too seductive to resist. For those of us who use the internet in our daily jobs, it is often difficult to detach ourselves from it and get real work done. But the problem runs deeper - we can lose a bit of our soul in the Faustian deal we have unwittingly agreed to when we signed up for our cable modem and dsl line.

Check out this article from Paul Ford at his site Ftrain.com. (There's another hyperlink! Resist the urge to follow it until you finish reading this post.)
Mr. Ford has written a though-provoking article describing a sort of loss of humanity inherent in our relationship with the internet. His basic premise is that the internet provides too much information and can serve as big distraction to real learning and working. Ford describes his concept of "wide" and "narrow" distractions. Narrow distractions are those that lead us to study some focused question and thereby learn something useful. Wide distractions are those that distract but don't lead anywhere useful - like the hyperlink that takes you from looking at a weather map to lookup up a stock quote to reading a review on Consumer Reports to...wow, where did that hour go? Paul relates this to lower productivity as he struggles to focus on his writing when connected to the temptations of a broadband connection. His answer? Detaching from the borg by using a non-networked word processor. Coining the term "Amish Computing" he says that removing the distraction improves his writing and helps him reconnect to his humanity.

A follow up article by Mr. Ford can also be found here. The irony to this whole post is that I found his posts during an episode of "wide distraction". Paging Dr. Faust...