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We’ve been frittering away the early months of 2000 on frivolous pursuits. Some of us have been blaming ourselves for the unseemly panic around Y2K, which turned out to be the most sedate New Year the world has seen since the beginning of time. (And what did we do on New Year’s Eve before the beginning of time?) The rest of us, of course, have been blaming others for the unseemly panic around Y2K.
When not consuming personal bandwidth on this undirected rage, we’ve been debating what to call this first year of the new millennium (or the prenatal year of the new millennium, if you’re one of those smart guys who’ve been trying to convince the rest of us that life begins at “1”). The double aughts? Double ohs? The tookeys? The naughts?
You’d think with all this yakking and arguing that we’d come closer together as a nation. At the very least, you’d think we’d have newfound exhilaration as a nation in the discovery of new and frequently unique things to fight about.
Well, a Stanford University study indicates that the Internet is starting to have a negative effect on America’s social life. Maybe “negative” isn’t exactly the right word. People are spending more time online anyway, reducing the time they spend with friends, family, and television.
Myself, I’m starting to think that academics are spending rather too much time putting studies together. Good grief. Don’t they have anything better to do? Why aren’t they emailing Mahir’s URL to each other like the rest of us?
And if I understand the process by which the data for this study was gathered, frankly, it seems a little flawed. My local newspaper (San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 16, 2000) told me that the researchers “provided more than 4,000 adults” with “Internet appliances and free Net access so they could answer the survey questions.”
Excuse me, but if people are spending too much time on the Internet, isn’t this enabling behavior? Maybe we need a study studying the mindset of study makers. What are we to make of this, for instance: One of the conclusions of the study, according to the Chronicle, was that “every hour spent online typically reduces television viewing by an hour.”
Yes, and every time you eat a banana you’re not eating an apple. If you’re stockpiling beans for the real Y2K (next year), you can’t eat them now. If you’re ordering a CD over the Internet, you can’t listen to the CD at the same time, unless you already have it. But then why would you order it? You’d be insane!
On the other hand, it’s conceivable that one could watch television, argue with one’s girlfriend on the phone about who’s paying more attention to whom, surf the Net, scarf down a slice, and scribble a business model on the back of a pizza carton all at the same time. It’s called multitasking. Those who do it may be statistically insignificant, but they may in fact be the ones funding these studies. It’s all just making my head hurt.
And there’s a huge segment of the population that’s untouched by these studies. These are people who aren’t home or in an office long enough to bid on E-Bay gewgaws, order groceries over the Web, chat each other up, or find out what Britney is up to.
And yet, ironically, these people are out there busting their hump making sure that the new Internet economy hums along. I’m talking about the people who load the boxes in the warehouses where our tsotchkes reside even as we covet their jpeg representations in cyberspace. I’m talking about the people who load the trucks that bring these goods to our doors, and the people who drive those trucks, bring the packages to our door, ring the doorbell, take our digital signatures, hand over the Backstreet Boys CD, and go on their way.
In other words, where would the Internet economy be without the United Parcel Service and FedEx?
Come to think of it, if the Internet is an unmediated environment, with nothing standing between us and our dreams but a monitor screen, why do dot-coms need billboards, television ads, flashy names, and logos? Face it: If you don’t know which of the millions of Web sites out there is the right one for you, you’ll never find it without the exoskeleton of advertising, promotion, and public relations.
And so, truck drivers and admen, I salute you! Without people to move the product and others to shout to us where we can get the product, the entire Internet economy would collapse like a house of cards. Come to think of it, the whole thing is starting to look a lot like mail order. Not to mention television.
But at least it’s bringing us closer together.
Ian Shoales is just another guy with a credit card, PC, and modem. He lives in San Francisco.
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