I
was sitting in a large meditation hall in a converted novitiate in
central Massachusetts when I reached into my pocket for my iPhone. A
woman in the front of the room gamely held a basket in front of her,
beaming beneficently, like a priest with a collection plate. I duly
surrendered my little device, only to feel a sudden pang of panic on my
way back to my seat. If it hadn’t been for everyone staring at me, I
might have turned around immediately and asked for it back. But I
didn’t. I knew why I’d come here.
A
year before, like many addicts, I had sensed a personal crash coming.
For a decade and a half, I’d been a web obsessive, publishing blog posts
multiple times a day, seven days a week, and ultimately corralling a
team that curated the web every 20 minutes during peak hours. Each
morning began with a full immersion in the stream of internet
consciousness and news, jumping from site to site, tweet to tweet,
breaking news story to hottest take, scanning countless images and
videos, catching up with multiple memes. Throughout the day, I’d cough
up an insight or an argument or a joke about what had just occurred or
what was happening right now. And at times, as events took over, I’d
spend weeks manically grabbing every tiny scrap of a developing story in
order to fuse them into a narrative in real time. I was in an unending
dialogue with readers who were caviling, praising, booing, correcting.
My brain had never been so occupied so insistently by so many different
subjects and in so public a way for so long.
I
was, in other words, a very early adopter of what we might now call
living-in-the-web. And as the years went by, I realized I was no longer
alone. Facebook soon gave everyone the equivalent of their own blog and
their own audience. More and more people got a smartphone — connecting
them instantly to a deluge of febrile content, forcing them to cull and
absorb and assimilate the online torrent as relentlessly as I had once.
Twitter emerged as a form of instant blogging of microthoughts. Users
were as addicted to the feedback as I had long been — and even more
prolific. Then the apps descended, like the rain, to inundate what was
left of our free time. It was ubiquitous now, this virtual living, this
never-stopping, this always-updating. I remember when I decided to raise
the ante on my blog in 2007 and update every half-hour or so, and my
editor looked at me as if I were insane. But the insanity was now
banality; the once-unimaginable pace of the professional blogger was now
the default for everyone.
If the internet killed you, I used to joke, then I would be the first to find out. ...
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