The Internet is what you make of it. I first met "the Internet" when it was ARPANet. Everyone who was anyone in my home town had an acoustic coupling device to talk to the Crays at work. However, kids didn't get to play with that. We visited my aunt, though, who had the exact same acoustic coupler and dot-matrix pistachio'n'white wormstrip printer and you could use it to play DUNGEN (aka Zork) on the university computer. That was eight. I didn't see "The Internet" again until Freshman year, when my university had 20 2400baud and 2 9600baud modems you could use to dial into their DEC PDP-11s. Laptops were monochrome. Windows 3.11 was state-of-the-art. My sophomore year NCSA Mosaic was replaced by Netscape and PINE was slowly supplanted by Eudora. My junior year they started stringing CAT5 cable in the dorms and Fraunhaufer leaked the MP3 codec. My senior year professors started asking us for our email addresses. Not a one of them used them for anything, though. By the time Youtube came out I'd been out of college more than half a decade. I mention this only to say that people like me - and it's a very narrow band - are the only ones who have really seen the world with "the internet" and the world without. So while you can say "the Internet is wasting our lives" I don't think you fully understand what your life would be like without. Imagine picking your music by perusing a catalog and looking at album covers, then waiting a week for your tapes to come in. Imagine playing multiplayer games via the post office. Imagine going to the library whenever you need facts. Finally, imagine a massive underground black market in SLP VHS tapes of low-budget pornography, of 3-year-old Penthouse and Hustler magazines hoarded and coveted by pimply-faced teenagers, of flipping back and forth every three seconds to see that brief half-second flash of clarity on the Playboy Channel or Skinemax where the decoder and the filter align for a brief, shining moment. Things were different. So allow me to make a few observations of you and your peers, from my lofty position of growing up as the Internet did, rather than stumbling upon it fully formed: - You use it as an excuse. There are amazing wonders on the Internet but you don't use it for that. - You use it as a crutch. I have more empathy than you. I am more eloquent than you. I handle social situations better than you. This is because so many of your interactions happen in a context-free text-based environment where you have no subtext to work with. Consequently I can out-argue you 99 times out of 100 because my Gymkhana was more stringent. I would not be mixing television in Hollywood if it were not for the Internet. I've optioned two screenplays because of friends I made over the Internet. And I find the Internet to be absolutely spectacular at finding things for me to do in the real world. I ride one of twelve Benelli Tre Ks in the Western Hemisphere. If it weren't for an exceedingly friendly online community I never would take the risk. As it is, any problem I encounter I have immediate help from Scotland to Adelaide. In 1993 I had to make a long distance call to Australia to look up a block number on a Chevy V6 because I thought it was a Holden (turns out it was a Mercruiser). Nowadays you just feed that string into Google and it'll tell you. * * * My generation wasted time, too. All generations did. The collective GPA of all quarter-based schools from 1994 to 2001 is probably a few points lower because TBS always ran Bond marathons during finals week. WoW wasn't a thing but f'ing DOOM sure was. Ridiculous amounts of time on Saturday nights were spent trying to beat EVO or Pilot Wings. And just like you, we drank too much cheap crap, smoked too much cheap weed and kicked ourselves for time wasted. The difference is we didn't blame the Internet, we blamed the Nintendo. Or the television. You're wasting time because you're a time waster, not because you have access to the wonders of the world. If you have time management issues, I could lock you in a racquetball court with a physics textbook and a Rubik's Cube and you'd know no more about Netwon's laws than you do now. Before people stared at television in the evening they stared at the fire. If you aren't enjoying your life, look in the mirror. Be the change you want to see in the world.
