Digital Compulsions

I find that I’m addicted to my computer.

It’s a necessity now- instant access to Firefox, Facebook, AIM, and Gmail grip me like no other force in my life. My world would temporarily suck into a toilet if someone so much as accidentally tripped over my power cord- power outages feel like black suffocation… but none of this bothers me. Because I know everyone reading this has access to and understands every application I just named. Everyone around me is just as addicted to the network media that’s swallowed us all- but I don’t have a problem with it.

Like every way of living, the digital economy has its ups and downs. Nobody complains about how quickly we can connect to each other, how incredibly quickened and instantaneously gratifying our lives have become, though everyone hates the always cold and impartial results of binary coding. Our experiences quantized are transmittable, shareable, and more available than ever before, if with all with grains of digitation in their many megabytes. But we ourselves are quantized creatures of quantized experiences- when every single sensation we go through is itself the result of interpreting the binary coding of nerves, why do we make a distinction between the binary within us and the binary in the computer screen?

So many people seem to cry against the “cold machine” that’s taking over, but I don’t think this is the biggest issue. Human interactions have always relied more on the intent and depth of conversations or letters, not the way they happen. Now and in the age before computers, close friends shared times together in the real world; relatives traveled to meet up with family; lovers crossed impossible distances to be with each other. But before we were all connected in this web, all these relations only interacted in the real time, when work and distances were not in the way. If anything, becoming digital has given people more of a chance to meet with the people they choose. E-mail gives us that much more chance to talk with people while we are working, while we are going through the motions we have to. No matter how cold or distant these interactions may seem, they are there as interactions when otherwise they wouldn’t be. And if people find that their relations with others are distanced because they communicate through the network media, that is entirely their own fault. If they can’t find the time out of their busy work life to meet with friends or family, what makes them think getting rid of their instant messenger and e-mail would let them?

No, the only problem I could have with the network information economy I find myself in is that I am dependent upon it. My life is tied psychologically to its instant connections, and my life at MIT would be very different without the Web (I’d have to go to every lecture then, wouldn’t I?). But then, that brings me back to my point that the World Wide Web, Facebook, AOL Instant Messenger, Gmail, and everything else that makes up that vast network out there, the one we can complain about, is indispensable. Think to yourself, “Would I get rid of the Internet?” “Would my relations suddenly improve because I find myself still rarely talking to them in the real world and not in the office, ever?”

Think to yourself, “Would I stop becoming digital?” If you’re reading this, I would say no. You wouldn’t stop Google's email from becoming better, or your favorite web browser improving its interface, or your life from becoming more and more digital. Because somewhere deep inside, you’re just as much a fan of becoming digital as I am.