Mitchell Hennings
English 110C
Prof. Emerson
November 8, 2017
Boredom to Meaning
Meaning and purpose can be found as a byproduct of using the internet. You can use the internet to find out about events, clubs, authors, bands, gatherings, all things that you would have never known about otherwise allowing you to expand your cultural experience. The advantage to having a short attention span is finding things that interest you quickly thus allowing the internet to develop and grow endlessly, and Tthe internet is a vessel for immediate cultural exchange no more are the days of isolation and avoiding other cultures. Wwe have no choice but to embrace the world, Embracing the complexities of life and enjoying them poetically especially the way the internet has such a tight grip on our lives.
The internet is a tool that can be used to create and expand cultural exchanges, inserting itself into people’s lives in a necessary and healthy way. People can create, search, and build with people all over the world instantly by simply pressing a button. By taking part in this we can create meaning and purpose for ourselves. The internet itself has created its own culture that involves “creat[ing] a new viral culture.. [creating] trillions of communications]”(Wasik 480). The Internet has connected people from all over, for example in Wasik’s experiment people were emailing him from Rome interested in creating their own sub-branch of the mob experiment, Wasick couldn’t “correspond with the leaders or even keep up with all the different new cities: not only across the United States but London, Vienna, multiple areas in Germany…..and Rome.”(481). The incredible transfer of cultures and ideas throughout the internet is what is showed directly in this situation, ideas were started in a small isolated incident and by the means of the internet ideas were transfered all the way to europe as far as Italy.
Having distractions allow us to stumble on to names, events, videos, etc, we wouldn’t have known about otherwise. In my personal experiences, I have found this to be especially true considering I found one of my favorite authors while stumbling aimlessly through the internet. I discovered Friedrich Nietzsche while looking up philosophy books and philosophers., hHis ideas and pieces of work have changed the way I think about the world and how I think about events in my own life. Discovering him actually drove me away from the internet, but without it I would have never found his work and I’d still be neck deep in the internet. In Anderson’s essay, he mentions how the internet is basically a giant “Skinner’s Box” that the endless rewards of the internet flow in endlessly, “dispens[ing] never ending little shots of positivity”(7). The internet is using our increasingly short attention spans by having us keep searching for new stimulants, we are stuck in a “gloriously unpredictable cycle”(7).By using my own experiences, the internet is a useful means to an end, but eventually you don’t even need it once you find a certain purpose or meaning.
The mundaneness of life captures us everyday, the way we wake up and check our phones, to looking for the next thing to buy with money we don’t have. But everything revolves one singular point, the internet. The internet is now a part of our lives as much as anything else it shapes us and creates the kind of people we are today, probably without us even knowing or understanding why. The difference between being bored and being lost is when you’re lost you know you have somewhere to be or have an end point, when you’re bored you have neither a beginning nor end simply floating through information and videos that mean nothing to you. G.K. Chesterton writes about how to find purpose in life’s everyday adventures must be made to experience them fruitfully. There are things in this world that make turn us old and lame, the internet is one of the variables that keep us young and vibrant. In the essay Chesterton talks about a young boy who talks about how a train station can be a poetic scene, “to be inside a railway station is to be inside a cavern of wonder and a palace of poetical pleasures”(1). The Internet is a place that can be poetic, relating back to what Anderson said earlier in my essay the internet is a place that rewards in random spurts in a somewhat poetic fashion described exactly by what Chesterton talked about in his essay.
I can relate this to my own life as I currently write this paper, my mind wanders as I write this paper in a quite poetic fashion. There are so many distractions that keep my mind wandering, the football game that plays in the background coupled with the voices of friends and music. It’s not that the paper isn’t getting written or it’s uninteresting, it’s the instant gratification that these other stimulants grant over the paper. It’s like having the mentality of the young boy, appreciating the situations I am in not rejecting or getting irritated by situations. It’s a current state of restlessness that I accept, it has become a part of my personal consciousness. In Aanderson’s essay, he talks about how our attention is shifting towards a state of a “new techno-cognitive nomadism, in which restlessness [is] an advantage”(11). This is how culture is transferred so quickly with the ease of being distracted, our interests being transferred like currency transactions from country to country. Also it aligns with making the best out of irritations and looking at situations poetically instead of flatly in black and white.
The internet is simply a vessel, a means to an end when finding your meaning on this earth. Once you find what you think your meaning is, run with it till the string runs out, because inspiration is fleeting. Nothing is forever as it is certain in this world, that’s the only thing we know for certain. The internet is a vessel for how cultural change can be transferred easily within seconds, that’s how wasick was so successful with the instant communication. The modern distractions that we face today allow us to delve deep within our own consciousness, finding interests in this things we would have never seen before. Joining the internet brings frustrations and confusion but this can be seen as an opportunity to live poetically and embrace the frustrations and enjoy the journey that the internet gives you.
Citation Page
Sam Anderson. “In Defense Of Distraction” New York Times. May 2009. Web. October 2017.
Bill Wasick. “My Crowd Experiment: The Mob Project” Emerging: Contemporary Readings for Writers, edited by Barclay Barrios. 3rd ed., Bedford/St. Martin, 2016, pp .474-489.
Chesterton, G. K.. “On running after one’s hat.” 1908. Quotidiana. Ed. Patrick Madden. 1 Dec 2007. 20 Nov 2017
