Saturday, July 20, 2024

Offline Call

 


So apparently today in the world, there was a pandemic of the “blue screen of death” out there in the realm of inconvenienced electrons and server farms.  So as a lark, I decided to turn off my wireless and see if I could spend the day away from my installed link to the grand Illusion commonly referred to as the “Internet”.

Mostly this is just going to be an “internet fast day”.  Kinda like Lent but only for a day to decompress a little bit and to get a feel for the nature of a forced absence.  I am obviously still typing and still doing my daily diary entry, but the immediacy of looking something up or seeing what is happening in the moment is removed.

I am wondering just how much of my incipient paranoia and my malaise concerning the state of the world is due to wallowing in the news cycle?  My morning routine is about a half hour of skimming the news feeds that I find to be marginally accurate in order to get an idea of the direction that the world is heading.  The trend is obviously down.  

I am unsure about what to think about this.  I have always been a news and politics junkie.  It is one of my worst personal failings.  The internet allows me to spend about the same time every day trying to figure out the direction of a system that is well outside of my control.  

So this leads me to ask myself a couple of questions that are difficult to answer:

 Is the world actually heading downhill, or am I just behind the times?

 Has the actual quality of the information I receive any differrent than the quality of the information during my salad days.

 Does the medium from which I obtain have an effect on my processing of the information?

There are a bunch more questions, but I think that these three are enought for today.


Circling back to my initial premise of working offline.  This might well be the way to go.  I need to do a little more research and figure out how to minimize being connected to the electronic monster.


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