I must be getting old

This is a long ramble, so I've divided it up into sections, like a Kit Kat.

I

For the past week in my new, unfurnished home I’ve been living through a novel double-experiment: having no chairs, and having no internet. In order to obtain either, I’ve had to come to my new office in the university, or pay the cost of a cup of tea in a suitably equipped café. Of the two deprivations neither has been pleasant, but the latter at least has been beneficial.

The lack of convenient internet access, unlike the lack of chairs, was also premeditated. I’ve been increasingly troubled for quite a long time by the intrusion of the world into private life via the devious means of the Web. (The name of which, if you pause to consider it, does sound rather sinister, like a great space-net dropped on the Earth by a race of malevolent alien slavers in order to capture humans for their intergalactic meat farms. But I digress.)

This growing worry that our society is becoming too dependent too quickly on this new technology, coupled with my natural aversion to crowds and clubs of any sort, has led me, now that I have the free choice, to delay having broadband installed in the house. I somehow feel that it is important to wean ourselves from the tightening embrace of modern technology just as toddlers must eventually be weaned and taught to walk on their own feet. For what infant has ever written a great novel, or led an army into battle, or (Jesus Christ excepted) ever accomplished anything of note, supposing we can agree that wailing at every slight discomfort and continually soiling oneself (and others) do not rank among the noblest achievements of the human race?

In a similar way the presence of the internet in every corner of life threatens to keep us infantile: dependent, amused only by novelty, increasingly incapable of concentration and independent thought. It teaches us not to think, but to parrot and recycle, to cut and paste, to hyperlink; curiosity becomes something to be sated with the click of a mouse, not through a slow and difficult search which leads us to places we never intended or expected. I’m thinking of this now especially because in a few weeks I’ll be teaching my first batch of 18-year-old students, and I’m expected a hard fight to get them in the library reading actual books.

II

I’m too young to be a trenchant technophobe, but I’m also old enough to remember a childhood spent in the uncertain dawn of the digital age. We bought our first home computer when I was nine, I was making computer games with my friends at fifteen, and at university I first grew acquainted with the World Wide Web, like me a child of the 80s which reached maturity in the late 90s (in August 1980, as I was busy being born, Tim Berners-Lee was busy fathering his pre-WWW ENQUIRE software experiment at CERN). I got myself an email account and a mobile phone, and joined MySpace, then Facebook, as the fashion demanded, which were followed by accounts on last.fm, Spotify, XBox Live and I don’t know what else. The internet is the miraculous tool of a thousand uses, an all-pervasive, ever-adapting pocket knife, the defining technological triumph of our age, and I’ve recognised and exploited its benefits as much as anyone.

But when a tool starts to determine how we think, feel and behave, we change from being controllers to being controlled. Like all cults, the cult of technology succeeds through giving the illusion of freedom and the security of acceptance. And we are fast approaching a decisive juncture, if we have not already passed it. Witness a recent TED lecture by tech-guru Seth Priebatsch entitled ‘The Game Layer on Top of the World’, where he predicts, surely correctly, that whereas the last decade saw the steady construction of social networks which bound us ever more closely together (Facebook being the obvious winner), the coming decade will be about the exploitation of these networks through game theory - that is, through the subtle manipulation of our behaviour in ways that advertisers and social scientists have known about for years, but which Web-based social networks have allowed to become exponentially more powerful.

Priebatsch, standing on stage, is the archetypal prophet of the digital church: young, healthy, hip, with a pair of wraparound shades propped on his head, a Princeton drop-out (as he is fond of reminding us) who evidentally does not play by the rules - except of course he does play by the rules, merely a different set, the rules of game theory, which he promotes with almost creepy enthusiasm and seems to take for granted we also will follow. Judging from the mindless applause of his audience, he is quite right. And if you think you’re not already the plaything of game theorists, think again: anyone who regularly plays Farmville or uses any kind of retail loyalty card has already lost the first fight, even if they were unaware it was being fought.

III

Concerned voices have been echoing around the Web for the last few years. The other week Teknofobe (a deliberately ironic nickname, I should note) told me about Nicholas G. Carr’s new book The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember, which I’ve since ordered and await eagerly. As far as I can tell without having yet read it, Carr is vexed chiefly by the cognitive effect of excessive internet use on the brain, and it seems that there is some scientific evidence for the rewiring of neural pathways even among relatively light internet users. Whether the overall implications are good or bad, I have no idea. You could probably also detect the rewiring of neural pathways in people who played gin rummy for an hour a day.

My own concerns are personal and instinctive, and found some resonance in a recent essay by Hal Crowther entitled One Thousand Years of Solitude. Unlike me, Crowther is an unrepentant technophobe: he damns the growing obsession with social connectedness and talks melodramatically, but with genuine feeling, of hives, cocoons and electronic slavery, of the internet as Trojan Horse and Gorgon. His is the parting shot of a dying, bewildered breed of pre-internet writers and thinkers: ‘If you’re offended or threatened,’ he laments bitterly, ‘console yourself with the impotence and rapid extinction of my kind.’

Yet he has a point. Solitude - not just physical solitude, which is irrelevant in the age of Blackberries and Twitter, but true, unwired social solitude - is becoming rarer and more precious by the day. I can’t deny that the sci-fi nerd in me likes the idea of a hyper-connected society of ease and plenty, a futuristic utopia where everyone is linked by beneficent technology and we all skip gaily towards a horizon of Tweets and rainbows.

The anti-social loner in me, however, long ago came to loath the banality of continual Facebook updates from people I hardly know, and even from people I do, when I would not trouble them to reveal such mundane facts and observations even if they were sat two yards from me and I was in a particularly friendly mood. The critical thinker in me is repelled by the ways in which total connectedness encourages group-think, and the internet, far from encouraging independent thought amidst mutually constructive dialogue, can just as easily become an echo chamber for a thousand isolated tribes of bigots and fools. The libertarian in me fears the seductive embrace of a virtual network which is founded on data-mining technology and by necessity regards human beings as nothing more than a collection of digits to be shunted around and manipulated en masse according to the models of game theory. The leftist in me fears the fact that this technology already lies in the sweaty hands of a global plutocracy.

IV

The internet is a tool. We should no more let it determine our thoughts and actions than we would restructure our minds according to the uses of a Swiss army knife. Let us decide when we need to use it, and then use it, and then put it away, and not have it pipe itself into every room of the house every minute of every day. I confess it makes me nervous to think of a life without broadband wi-fi at home, where I have to walk 20 minutes to my office or to a wi-fi café if I want to use it. On the other hand, I spent the first twenty-seven years of my life in such impoverished circumstances, and the fact that the prospect of doing without the internet makes me so nervous is perhaps the only reason I need to go ahead. If I habituated myself to it so easily, surely I can de-habituate myself too, hopefully before it’s too late.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the potential of the internet, not least because it allows me to post such long ramblings as this to my audience of literally a dozen or so readers (few in number, but treasured, except for Vlad, who represents the most devious and spiteful depths of the internet community, and everything that is wrong with the modern world). Yet as much as I love the potential of the internet, I also love the potential of a printed book to encourage deep reading and slow, active engagement in what I read without fear of distraction. For that matter, I love the potential of a bottle opener to open bottles, but I don’t keep it always in my pocket. If I did, it would be indicative of a serious addictive problem. And there’s the crux of it, and the reason why I shall try to continue to deprive my home of the internet.

Although I will eventually buy some chairs.