INTERNET

What did you do on the internet today?
By Peter Aspden

There are many ways in which the internet has had a negligible effect on our personal lives. We still go to the movies. We like having supper with friends. We gossip over a beer or a coffee; we ask, and get asked, for dates; we save up for holidays to help us unwind on a sandy beach. Football stadiums fill up on a Saturday afternoon, as do the best angling spots. We love going to see the Rolling Stones, again.

None of these pastimes – let’s call them the western way of life – is much transformed by engagement with the internet, other than in the trivial sense of making it easier to book tickets or tables. The physical essence of what we do bears a remarkable similarity to what we did 20 or 30 years ago.

And yet there has been a revolution in our lives. A quiet, subtle revolution. The skills and tools we have acquired in the workplace – zipping from one task or field of enquiry to another with bewildering speed – have followed us into our homes. The interconnectedness of everything means that the world really has come into our sitting rooms.

That used to be said of television, of course, but this is different. Television was controlled, curated, crafted to appeal. The relentless flow of information that gushes through the new media – wait, I’ve just received a text message to tell me that my eBay bid on a rare early Beatles single has been trumped – is promiscuous and predatory. We are easily seen as its victims. But it needn’t be so.

The unprecedented demands made of our brains in the 21st century can be stressful, to be sure. We are required to make lateral leaps in our imaginations on a daily basis; to hold several competing ideas in our minds at the same time; to work in various time-frames and shades of thought.

The hyperlink syndrome, the way our minds copy the workings of the internet and flit sharply from one idea to another, means that we have become addicted to the breadth of everything rather than the depth of something. The contemporary mind needs to be elastic and happy to forage in alien fields. We are yanked out of our comfort zones and must appear happy at the prospect. The methodical toiler who moves from beginning, to middle, to end is regarded as a dullard.

At times, it all appears too chaotic. But here is a comforting fact: it is not a competition. You can’t move faster than the internet. Scientists may insist that the circuits inside our heads are still superior to anything produced by machines, but it just doesn’t seem that way. The screen in the corner of your room is like your pet Alsatian: it is awesome, wild and potentially out of control; it just needs to be tamed.

I have just upped the bid on the rare Beatles single. I am in the information loop, yet I am also indulging in an esoteric hobby. I am making myself acquainted with a new circle of characters with whom I have at least one thing in common; yet I can remain, up to a point, anonymous. I’m winning a competition. I’m shopping. I am not restricted in my movements. I am free, relaxed, stimulated.

The overall result of my pursuit is cosmically unimportant, yet it matters enough to be diverting. I have tailored all the technology at my disposal for my own gratification. And, goodness, there has never been a better time for gratification. Techno-philosophers talk of the “oneness” of the forthcoming world, as media forms come together, with a sense of spiritual longing (see, for instance, the spoddier bits of The Matrix). But what most of us want from the newly-configured world is the ability instantly to get anything we want.

When I can’t sleep at night, I walk around for a while, download an early episode of Miami Vice, put it on my iPod and watch it in bed. I could just as easily order a Nepalese takeaway or a Siberian prostitute. When I go jogging, I listen to the New Yorker’s latest podcast on the American presidential election. It saves time, and tells me all I need to know on the subject.

We are moving towards an era in which everything will be available, everywhere, all the time. It is a revolution of technology, but also one of sensibility.

And it is about much more than instant gratification, of course. The phase we are in now is exciting, because we are right at the beginning of the revolution. Yes, once we learn how not to become a prisoner of the internet, and use it to complement rather than replace our wider field of vision, it makes life easier, more compact, in a host of inconsequential ways. But there are wider intellectual issues at stake, too.

One of these is the fragmentation of the world that arises from hyperlinking. This has manifested itself in important cultural spheres. At Tate Modern, if you want to see the collection of 20th- and 21st-century art, you will not see the normal chronological progression as devised by art historians, but a mix-and-match treatment of artistic themes that asks you, the viewer, to make allusions and connections.

If our children become used to thinking in this way, the resulting shift in their intellectual framework could herald no less than the death of linear narrative, or the death, at least, of that reassuring narrative, so beloved of Enlightenment thinkers onwards, that says that things generally get better over time. Perhaps they don’t, and perhaps we need to shock ourselves out of that belief.

In the meantime, all those silly ways we entertain ourselves online can act as a metaphor for the tumultuous changes to come. Think of an obscure song that once meant a lot to you. Find it online. Buy it or download it. Send it, share it, edit it, improve it. Anything is mutable. The world seems a confusing place. But has there ever been a better time to create Utopia?