My Slow Withdrawal From The Internet

Posted by Joseph_Phoenix on May 10, 2012 03:07 pm 4

I use the internet a lot. I crawl the web for news about sports, politics, tech and other things that interest me. Twitter is a great tool for consolidating all that info into one place. Thanks to Tweetdeck for that.

In the last couple of weeks, I can't help but feel a little bogged down. I remember when I read Paul Miller's post saying he was leaving the internet for a year. I feel like that's going to be a hard task for him and he's eventually going to reach a breaking point in his task but I wish him well and hope he succeeds.

I've been thinking about the internet lately and noticed that every since I've been more involved in social networks and various websites, I have been accumulating a lot of information. Not information locally but internationally. I have to honestly say that I haven't had as much fun as I used to have browsing the internet.

It all feels like a chore. It feels like work checking in daily on my regular sites and keeping up with my sports and technology podcasts and keeping track with what's on Twitter.

Feeling so bogged down, I decided to do something about it. I decided to take an indefinite leave from Twitter. I explained my reasoning in that post. I'm definitely having some withdrawal symptoms since leaving but it's been all good so far.

Since leaving Twitter, I've kind of stopped listening to a couple of podcasts as well. I aggregate most of my podcasts on Google reader. But I can't tell you the last time I actually visited my Google reader site. I still listen to some podcasts on the Zune software.

I'm trying to cut down on my internet usage for other sites. I used to be the guy who had 15 to 20 tabs open on the browser. I'm trying to cut down on that as well. Right now, I'm at 6 tabs. So far, so good.

So in short, I think I've had information overload thanks to the internet. I can't read comments anymore because no one is civil anymore (The Verge commentators are actually pretty good)

This should be interesting. Hopefully, this helps in the long run