Disentangling Ourselves from the Infinity of The Web

The internet, that ubiquitous funnel which feeds our digital addiction, has the power to transform our relationship to reality and shape our vision of the world.

Viewed through the screens of our computers, reality has been rendered abstract, two-dimensional, pixelated.

When I awake in the morning before brushing my teeth, almost before wiping the sleep from my eyes, I connect.

The gesture, from one who grew up with a telephone that had a dial on it and wrote with an ink pen that smudged, is already a reflex. I now type faster than I can write. I have become, as have we all, homo-interneticus.

Lifting the screen of my notebook in the morning is a metaphor for opening a virtual window onto the world. If I look out of my analogue window I see a slice of sky, a bird chirping on a branch, the chaos of green in my garden. From my digital window I view the planet, a fragmented and bewildering tangle of information beamed at me from the four corners of the globe.

With my connection, wireless of course, comes information and knowledge. I have the potential to know anything and everything. "Seek and ye shall find", beckons the internet, oracle of the modern age.

But when we step back from the glow of our screens, close our digital windows and re-focus ourselves on more immediate three-dimensional reality, there is a nagging sense that the web may be be exactly what its name suggests - a tool of entrapment in which we have already become hopelessly entangled.

Or worse still, if we are not caught in the Web then we have ourselves, like nodes in a matrix, become a part of it: feeding it with ever more information and consuming blindly the infinite stream of data it serves up to our screens.

People of a certain age - meaning those who remember what life was like before computers - harbour a suspicion that we were perhaps better off, in some ways, without them. They remember an era when life was slower and more contemplative. When our minds were better able to focus and concentrate.

But before email, sms, Facebook and now Twitter how could we have communicated or read as much from so many diverse sources as we do today? Isn't the internet enriching us; creating more opportunities to exchange ideas, to learn, to gain access to the ideas of others, to be aware?

There is the nagging concern, however, that though we may communicate more and even read more, the quality of our communication and of the information we consume has deteriorated. A few lines, stripped of their grammar and in some cases of their correct spellings are all it takes to create a ripple in cyberspace that says "I'm thinking of you" or "I'm here, where r u."

In an era where 'site traffic' not kiosk sales are becoming the benchmarks which determine the power, and revenue streams, of today's news providers, is it not the lowest common denominator of information, the most titillating, scintillating facts with the greatest mass appeal, that will dominate our online diet of news?

But while older folks may grumble that younger folks read less books and find it hard to concentrate, can they deny that young folks are at least reading. In this internet age the truth is that we are reading from morning to night. In our professional lives we are reading and composing written messages each waking hour of the day. Never has so much been read or written, by so many, so quickly.

Though we may read more, the vortex of communication in which we are gripped often leaves us with little time to read books - of the three-dimensional, paper kind. Suddenly books and the printed page, once the epicenter of their own 'illuminating' revolution, seem dated and dusty. Engulfed in our daily tsunami of emails, videos, Facebook updates and news bulletins how many of us have still much time for a good old fashioned book?

I know that when the day has run its course, the gentle pleasure of opening a book and devouring a few pages lit only by the lamp beside me is a delight that sets my synapses dancing. I know, too, that this is partly because I am of a certain age (not old mind you) so that books still hold for me a certain romantic charm. The book is still an object of some reverence to be thumbed, browsed and weighed in the hand.

Where book information differs crucially from the words pouring forth from the web is that books are finite. You can hold them and perceive them in their finite entirety - like a painting, or a photograph, or almost any work of art. This is why reading books, as opposed to reading on the internet, is so different.

The internet, by contrast, is infinity. It is the ocean which fills the horizon. We can navigate it, we can swim in it but we cannot hope to hold it in our hands, nor can we ever really hope to comprehend its enormity. In this sense, the internet is inhuman - because it surpasses the human scale. The book, however, that can be held and read from cover to cover remains an object of distinctly human proportions.

Now I am sounding nostalgic, which helps nobody. The internet is the future, I would be a fool to deny it. Electronic books are perhaps the future too. What I hope is that somehow we will be able to find ways to tame the Web, to learn how to disconnect, and to stem or at least filter the flood of information in which we are today literally drowning.

For while the internet brings us many things, its virtual reality and the infinity of its possibilities should complement rather then replace the analogue creations which have the power, in a more simple, perhaps more human, way to excite us through their finite simplicity and their ability to ignite our imaginations to the infinite possibilities of creativity.