A week of minimal internet

I normally read an enormous amount of text on the internet. Blogs, newsletters, Discord, giant Hacker News threads, weird PDFs I fish up from Google Scholar, whatever. I’ve tried temporarily banning myself from specific parts (like blogs or Twitter) before but thought I’d try a more drastic experiment where I couldn’t read any of that stuff. So I spent one week where I was only allowed to look up directly relevant practical things, or reply to emails and messages.

I realise people love doing this sort of experiment and then writing up their boring thoughts on it. I'll try and not make this a completely banal "phones bad" account like you've read a hundred times before, but no promises.

The experiment was mostly not as hard as I expected. Well, OK, there was one afternoon where I got intensely bored. Excerpt from the journal I kept:

- After lunch and I would really like to read some crap on the internet. It’s not fair

- This experiment doesn’t feel very interesting. I’m mainly learning that the internet is good actually and I like it

- There are 155 bristles on my hairbrush. Arranged in 7 rows, 21+22+23+23+23+22+21

- 15:00. I’m bored. Bored bored bored BORED. This is the most bored a person has ever been. It should be illegal to be this bored

Otherwise, I adapted pretty fast. My main internet text replacements were playing piano (surprisingly this is extremely low activation energy, you can just sit down and get started in seconds) and reading books. I was surprised how it became almost instantly very easy to concentrate on books when I knew there were no possible internet distractions.

David MacIver was writing about some similar experiments in How to read more books, where he pokes fun at excuses people sometimes come up with for not reading, including:

“I can’t read books because my phone has rewired my brain to require constant stimulus from short-form content.”

I didn’t believe this exactly, but I did sort of implicitly assume that there was some level of adaption to rapidly switching between distractions that would be hard to reverse. This wasn’t the case at all. As soon as I started the internet experiment and there was literally nothing I was allowed to look up online, I stopped having the feelings of wanting to check for anything new. I could just read books for two-hour stretches without coming up with reasons to switch tasks. And as soon as I started using the internet normally again, they came back.

My experience matches very closely with the current environment and supporting context being the important thing, rather than some "rewired my brain" type of explanation where I'd need some longish adjustment period in either direction. This is really good to know, actually. My brain still works fine!

So, given this, am I going to continue the experiment? Absolutely not, for a couple of reasons.

First, although I definitely read more books, it’s not obvious that the quality of what I read during the experiment was an improvement on what I'd have read otherwise. It’s possible that this particular week was not very representative. There seemed to be an unusually good haul of interesting writing when I finally came back to check blogs and newsletters and follow up on some links. And on the other hand, I mostly read old Alexander Technique books of varying quality. Also, I obviously only caught up the places that were likely to be good, rather than the giant Hacker News threads of pedants arguing.

I do think, though, that the best internet text is genuinely very good. I think densely-hyperlinked internet longform is a great genre, and actually better for a lot of nonfiction than the book format, which tends to encourage padding with filler text and hiding dubious citations somewhere at the back.

Second, it was crap socially. Reading books for hours at a time with no urge to switch tasks was very familiar from being a teenager, but so was the social and intellectual isolation. I really want to be able to talk to fellow internet weirdos about things I don’t have much IRL outlet for. This links back to the first point too. Another nice feature of internet text is that you can talk back!

I do want to tilt the balance a bit more towards books, though. Also, it's good to clear out some of my worst habitual reading and let myself get bored for a bit, to see what I find instead. So I’m trying to figure out something sustainable that gives me enough uninterrupted book-reading time while still getting me my finding-interesting-things and talking-to-weirdos vitamins. My current experiment is to keep discord and other messaging going, but corral blogs and newsletters into a two hour period in the evening. As for other kinds of internet text, I’m dropping the “only direct practical relevance” rule and letting myself read anything that isn’t one of my usual distractions. I have to go fishing around the internet rather than slipping into standard habits.

(Also no reading those threads on Hacker News. Why was I even doing that?)

I’ll probably have to try one or two more iterations of the rules, but I think something like this has a good chance of working.