Hey all you denizens of the cyberswamp! What are you doing reading this? You've got work to do! You've got books of your own to write, thoughts of your own to think, and instead, you're wasting hours every day reading what other people think about things like ... the Harry Potter ending. Writers' houses. The bogus manuscript. Does blogging reduce the collective intelligence of the human race?
I've just returned from the place I go to write when I get really desperate. A place where (imagine this) there is no internet. Where there is no online shopping, no blogging, no Google. In modern terms, it's a wasteland, a place worryingly similar to the landscape Cormac McCarthy describes in The Road. Only no Oprah, and a fairly good pub up the road. In three days, I accomplished more actual writing (my job, writing books, in case I've forgotten) than I have since the last week I spent there, back in April.
OK, I admit it: I'm easily distracted. But how do people manage to follow so many blogs and have a family, friends, hold down a job on the side? (Of course I wrote most of a novel while gainfully employed, but that's another story.)
I telephoned a friend in Silicon Valley the other day - his job involves advanced computer technologies I don't even begin to understand - and I told him that I was spending far much too much time just cruising around in cyberspace when I should be working.
"How many hours a day do you waste on the net?" I asked him.
"All of them," was his reply.
What are we doing? Are there people out there, the mentally disciplined, who don't start at Wikipedia looking for the birthdate of William Shakespeare for a casual aside in a bit of dialogue and end up four hours later, via a wonderfully logical train of net-thought, booking a birds of prey day at Mary Arden's cottage for a child's birthday party four months from now?
Help. Get me out of here. I'm starting to think Andrew Keen has a point.
via the guardian blog..
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