When you read a book, watch tv, or consume other type of media, you do it for a purpose. Most of the time the purpose is to entertain yourself. But on the web, specially on so called social media like Twitter, the purpose is constantly being challenged and shifted. It’s a two way, or asynchronous conversation as it has been proselytized, but you still have to manage that expectation. To listen or to talk, to participate or to follow, to write or to read. This is theoretically great, but you will never have that sense of completion I was talking about. It’s an open loop that never closes in your head.
This is a classic "quitting an addiction" post. I've seen and heard this many times, from people playing wow to smokers to coffee drinkers.<p>If you have to announce how and why you are quitting, then you probably <i>are</i> doing it too much.
I've been thinking about doing something like this for weeks.<p>It seems like at the start of my day I'll log onto Hacker News and read 5 or 6 interesting articles. However, without even trying, by the end of the day, all the links will be grey instead of black. I'll end up clicking on every link, even the links I really don't give a shit about. It's a time sink - it really is like surfing channels without feeling as guilty about it.<p>However, I wouldn't want to quit, I'd really want to limit myself. I'm not sure how to approach that though. Maybe an hour a day or reading random articles? How can I count that? Maybe a firefox extension.<p>But then how do I seperate searching for random articles from searching for solutions to problems when I'm coding or doing real work? How do I seperate those two things? I think part of what makes the internet so easy to kill time on is that it blurs the distinction.<p>If anyone can come up with a good plan or strategy to prevent time and life from being sucked away by the dark corners and alleys of the internet, while still allowing me to use it for interesting and productive work, please let me know. I think it would be helpful for all of us.
"illusion of an audience"<p>What about those who use this illusion to drive traffic to their website or front door? Just because you use Twitter for useless chatter doesn't mean everyone else does. Or am I missing the point of the article?<p>If you spend x hours Tweeting every week and can track it all the way to measurable 'results', you can still get a sense of accomplishment that the author seems to be searching for.
I tend to agree with the exception of watching TV. Watching TV is even worse than wasting time on the Web. Here you are just a passive consumer while on the Web you at least take part in communication.