It’s Time to Admit That the Internet Is Bad for Us
Television was supposed to be the ultimate idiot box. Then came the internet.
Sometime in the 1990s, most of my friends and I got rid of our TVs. This was how you could tell who the interesting, literate people were. If you went to a party where people were talking about whatever was on last night, you knew to make an excuse to go get another drink and find someone else to talk to. Writers could use this as a kind of shorthand: You knew that young Leslie Burke in Bridge to Terabithia and Clarisse McClellan in Fahrenheit 451 came from families of intellectual freethinkers because they didn’t have TVs at home. The subversive cinema made by the first generation of television’s children — Blue Velvet, Brazil, Repo Man, Videodrome — made TV viewing look about as cool as a lobotomy, something old folks enshrouded on couches did to euthanize their brains.
But then, only a few years later, everybody was online. And people are far more uncritical of the internet than they ever were of TV. Everyone laments it, but no one doesn’t have it. The internet is now as ubiquitous as TV ever was and as indispensable as the telephone: You need it for work and for news; to make plans and get invitations, directions, and dates; to listen to music and watch TV or movies; to look at cat memes and porn. Not…
