TITLE: Distracted All the Time, or "Warped by YouTube"
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: September 23, 2010 10:24 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
A friend sent me an e-mail message last night that said,
among other things, "So, you've been recruiting."  I
began my response with, "It's a hard habit to break."
Immediately,
<A HREF="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsDAEWBuiWo">
   this song</A>
was in my ear.  I had an irrational desire to link to
it, or mention it, or at least go play it.  But I doubt
Rick cared to hear it, or even hear about my sudden
obsession with it, and I had too much to do to take the
time to surf over to YouTube and look it up.

Something like this happens to me nearly every time I
sent down to write, especially when I blog.  The desire
to pack my entries with a dense network of links is
strong.  Most of those links are useful, giving readers
an opportunity to explore the context of my ideas or to
explore a particular idea deeper. But every so often, I
want to link to a pop song or movie reference whose
connection to my entry is meaningful only to me.

YouTube did this to me.  So did Hulu and Wikipedia and
Google and Twitter, and the rest of the web.

What an amazing resource.  What a joy to be able to meet
an unexpected need or desire.

What a complete distraction.

It is hard for someone who remembers the world pre-web
to overstate how amazing the resource is.  These days,
we are far more likely to be surprised <B>not</B> to
find what we want than the other way around.  Another
friend expressed faux distress this morning when he
couldn't find a video clip on-line of an old AT&T
television commercial from the 70s or 80s with a Viking
calling home to Mom.  Shocking!  The interwebs had
failed him.  Or Google.

Still there are days when I wonder how much having
ubiquitous information at my fingertips has changed me
for the worse, too.  The costs of distraction are often
subtle, an undertow on the flow of conscious thought.
Did I really need to think about Chicago while writing
e-mail about ChiliPLoP?  The Internet didn't invent
distraction, but it did make a cheap, universal
commodity out of it.

Ultimately, this all comes back to my own weakness, the
peculiar way in which my biology and experience have
wired my mind for making connections, whether useful or
useless.  That doesn't mean the Internet isn't an enabler.

I am in a codependent relationship with the web.  And we
all know that a codependent relationship can be a hard
habit to break.
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