Take a reality check. Note how many hours you spend online — checking email and chat messages, wading through Facebook, monitoring Twitter, browsing the trending videos on YouTube, following memes and links shared with you, playing games, reading news, calling on WhatsApp or Skype, sharing images and posts on your favourite social networks… you get the message.
I mean, actually sit down and take stock, in minutes and hours. Maybe it’s close to impossible to have an accurate measure, but you will get a general idea of how big that slice of your day is. Someone called Facebook a big “time suck” and indeed, much of the Internet is. It draws you in and keeps you there, wandering about from place to place through clicks and shares and likes and comments. You begin by wanting to just quickly check into your mailboxes of various descriptions for those important messages you’ve been expecting, and before you know it, an hour or more has passed.
Yes, there’s been learning and interaction, keeping up with the gossip and staying clued into conversations, but beyond that? You’re probably just caught up enough not to look clueless when your friends talk about the latest thing gone viral, but may not have anything substantive to add to that exchange (which is mostly in the vein of: “Did you know…?” “I couldn't believe that…” “I don't agree with…”). The dangerous thing about this is that there is an illusion of busy-ness that is associated with being logged in. We might begin with that completely legitimate reason — to look up a reference on Google Scholar, or verify a definition on Wikipedia — but it’s very easy for one thing to lead to another in that seamless digital environment. As a friend put it, soon we have so many tabs open (on our screens and in our minds) that we forget which one is the really important one!
Taking stockThe Internet is a great place, and our lives are certainly the richer for having access to so much information and sociality at the click of a button or the swipe of a finger. But perhaps some conscious timetabling may be worth the trouble if we are to not lose large swathes of our productive years immersed in it without purpose.
It takes some commitment to the idea that we don’t need to be logged in all the time. Or that somehow the important things are not going to be missed if we stop scrolling down that Facebook wall. Or that there are stimulating conversations on that WhatsApp group we need not be part of. Or that we need not frantically click on and scan (with our exhausted minds) every link that our friends share or forward or tweet. Or that every five minutes, even when waiting in line for a bus or riding pillion on a bike or at a traffic light, you don’t have to check your messages.
So how does one do it?
This is a lesson I learned from my 80-year-old mother in law, who is as enthusiastic a user of Pinterest and YouTube as anyone half (or even a quarter) her age. She plays her favourite online game for exactly fifteen minutes every day.
She checks her messages twice a day or when there is a ping on Skype or iMessage. She looks for interesting craft ideas online during the time between lunch and tea, and listens to concerts on YouTube in the evening.
Of course, when you’re a student, one may require much more “legitimate” Internet time for studying or research, but it is the other uses that I am suggesting we regulate. Purposive searching and reading with a goal in mind is great, but not all the time we spend online goes to this account. Gaming, pleasure browsing, and chatting, for instance. What if we sorted out our day in such a way that we reward ourselves with casual wandering on the Internet no more than twice a day for a limited time? Or we set an alarm to warn us when 30 minutes on Facebook, or 20 minutes of game activity, are up.
Being conscious of what we are doing with our time is the first step to making more time available to do the things we should be — or need to be — doing. I’m not suggesting we become slaves to a schedule, but bring some balance to the way we distribute our time. While there are many other activities that take up our time in ways we do not have control over (traffic, tedious assignments, housework), time lost on the Internet could perhaps be reclaimed?
The author teaches at the University of Hyderabad and edits Teacher Plus magazine. Email: usha.bpgll@gmail.com.
