No surfing
I have written many times before about how we don't watch TV in the house, by which I mean we don't have cable (well, we have it for broadband, but we don't subscribe to the TV service) and we don't have any antennas hooked up to our two small, soon-to-be-obsolete analog TVs. We still watch the occasional movie or TV series via DVD or VHS tape, but I would say I watch something that way maybe two hours a week, on average, if that. And that has been the way it is in the Lehmer household since 2000.
I used to hypocritically brag about the "no TV" thing and how much time it saved, which I then wasted by surfing the Web every day for a couple of hours. By "surfing" I mean sitting around idly reading the news and clicking through on various "interesting" sites and so on. Like channel surfing except with a 101-key remote. Last year I went on a news sabbatical so that waste of time is gone, and about four or five months ago I switched to a "feeds only" method for using the Web. Now I don't "surf" at all. Sure, I still go to a Web site once in a while if some post links to it and it looks interesting, and I still buy things from Amazon, but I no longer spend time just clicking around. And if I come upon a site that is interesting but doesn't offer a feed I don't go back - really.
Now that I've gotten used to it I love the syndication/subscription model. I look back at all the time I used to waste checking various sites daily (or more). No longer. And I don't use that gained time to then pile on the subscriptions in my reader to waste my time there instead. I am actually pretty ruthless with feeds and if I end up skimming one or ignoring it for a period of time I will usually unsubscribe. The point is not to fill up hours a day with idle reading but to follow only what's interesting and ignore all the rest so there's time to do other things. Because the day is only 24 hours, and there's always stuff to be done.
So, do you still surf? Why? Isn't there something better you could be doing with your time?
6 comments:
I think about life without surfing, and...I can't think about it anymore. :)
Seriously, though, most of my Internet time (which is still too much, btw) is now spent reading blog feeds (thanks to your advice, I now have Google Reader), and writing my own.
Jeff,
Yeah, I want to concentrate more on writing my own stuff, and surfing cuts into that. So out it went!
Jim,
So that's where all that time went! There and cutting and pasting my profile into all the personal ads.
Seriously, once I discovered Google's reader things started going better. And I joined in on the news moratorium, sort of. Sometimes I'll hear the news on my sister's TV and have to google it to see what's happening, like the Illinois earthquake.
Reading the news for a former journalist is just a hard habit to shake.
-Sam
Sam,
I've actually found that there is nothing new in the "news", so it really isn't missed. That's not to say I avoid it completely - I hear about 15 minutes of NPR during my morning and afternoon commutes (ah, the joys of working and living in a small city - 10 minute commutes :o), but during the times I'm driving a lot of it in the morning ends up being the local news. Which is fine. And I see the headlines on iGoogle before I log in, so in some broad sense I know the top five stories from an "above the fold" perspective. And that's enough. I don't miss it at all. "Dogbert's perpetual newspaper" and all that.
Nope, I don't surf much anymore either. Feeds account for most of my interaction with the internets these days.
Once in a while I'll follow a link from something I'm reading, or do a search that will lead me on a bit of a time-wasting random rabbit trail.
But not so much any more.
And you're right about "the news". It has become something altogether different than it purports to be, and is pretty much (how can I put this gently?) -- a completely idiotic and utterly worthless waste of time. Yeah.
CH,
And once you've been out of following it for a while, when you do encounter "the news" it really does seem idiotic. It continues to amaze me, for ex., that the "election coverage" is really American Idol - it's all about the horse race. I NEVER hear anything mentioned about the candidate's actual positions beyond simplistic summaries. Instead it's all about how they "played" to this or that demographic, and nuances over super-delegates, etc. Nothing about which one would actually be a better president, and why.
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