Beltane Waxing Dyan Moon
Lingering, an interesting article from the blog N+1, asks the question, is life richer with the internet? The author answers in a mild positive, noting that the web satisfies curiosity and provides a platform for otherwise missing voices, but he also bemoans its time wasting nature, the fact that there is no such thing as sending one e-mail because one internet encounter leads to another and another.
My own experience is similar. Anyone with curiosity finds this and that, then a bit more with the news and blogs and video clips. I know the path people take is not the same because friends locate items I would never find, some of them interesting, some of them not, but it does show that others wander the web from time to time.
Quite a while ago, maybe as long ago as 15 years, I knew a sociologist from Macalester College who had done a study of time wasted on the computer. This was before the internet was as big a phenomenon as it is now. His results suggested that computer use in and of itself lured users into acts extraneous to their original purpose, acts such as reading an e-mail from a friend or sending on something interesting, perhaps checking the calendar or writing a brief note about this or that.
It may be that some web users are like me, my main outlet for manual dexterity is typing. A secondary outlet is chopsticks. The opportunity to type, in and of itself, draws me to the computer and sometimes keeps me there.
