The Futility of Knowledge (Or How the Internet can waste your time)

Peggy Orenstein's NY Times article was very interesting to me since it combines my appreciation for the epic Homeric classics with my disdain for time wasting devices! The analogy that she draws is so accurate and so revealing about our learned dependence on the Internet that I found myself agreeing with the article out loud in my room, as though she were right there and I needed to vocalize my agreement.

With the advent of broad-band, high speed Internet connectivity, most of us expect to reach the next website and acquire our desires immediately. Patience is no longer a virtue, but a burden for those with slower connection speeds. Sometimes I find myself sitting in front of my computer for a half hour at a time waiting for my connection to repair, when I could be reading something on my bed or grabbing a snack. The truth is that with so many links available to us at the click of a button, we could conceivably spend days holding our mouse's and clicking, clicking, clicking....

Just as when the television set became available to the American public, the Internet has the power to turn thinking intelligent human beings into silent zombies fixated on a screen. The power of these media to hypnotize us and capture our attention for broad periods of time quite frankly frightens me. Just like Homer's Sirens who captivated men with their song, many of the electronic media that we have access to in the 21st century can hypnotize us.