I HAVE found a solution to the problem of internet addiction. What problem, you might ask – the internet is a liberating force; global information exchange is multiplying at an exponential rate; billions of bytes are moving round the globe, connecting the previously unconnected, bringing about a golden age of information, knowledge and freedom. To which I reply: Shut your moronic mouth, you twittering twit.
Forty-five million daily Twitter messages all saying: "Hey everybody, look at me, message me back to let me know I exist" are not liberating anyone. Far from it, such things are ushering in an era of consensual conformism and technology dependence; e
ngendering new insecurities and paranoias.
Over the past month my addiction to e-mail and Twitter was making me ill. I was checking every ten minutes to see if anyone had sent me a poke or a kiss or a word or even just a letter or exclamation mark. On a day in which no one contacted me at all, after having checked perhaps 50 times, I was close to tears with rage and self pity. "My God, I may as well be dead, I am nobody in cyberspace!"
As I say, I've found a cure to the problem of internet surfing addiction – beach-combing.
I'm currently living by the banks of a remote Scottish sea loch on a writer's residency and it takes an uphill hike to a distant building to get connected to the net.
This was hard to accept at first, and I went through internet withdrawal symptoms (pacing, nail biting, swearing at walls, etc). But after a week of running up and down a sheep-covered hill every 15 minutes, I realised that in the name of sanity I had to have a routine, a ration.
I now log on twice a day for 30 minutes at 9am and 6pm. I still get the same number of messages but I have eight hours less stress. I've even come to dread the time when I have to log on.
What has helped me go cold turkey is a total change in routine. I start the day now, not running to my laptop, but strolling down to the beach. Rather than trawling through e-mails and sending 50 in the hope of getting one in return, I breathe in cold clean air, look out at the mountains and gaze among the rocks and shells to see what accidental objects the waves have brought me.
Several hundred pieces of coloured glass, half as many of blue-glazed ceramics, the gears of a rusty bike, sun-bleached silver birch sticks, razor shells, a single Adidas trainer, a marker pen (that still works) – I may just be picking up crap that previous generations dropped or threw out (I harbour no illusions that I'm finding jewels from sunken galleons), but none the less the daily process of sifting is profoundly calming and helps me focus on the day's work ahead.
What will I do with all these objects? Who knows? Girlfriend is making objets d'art and jewellery out of them. As for me, the process of collecting is enough in itself; even if I was to throw all my stones, glass and ceramic bits back into the estuary, I would have achieved a meaningful goal – to stay away from the internet as long as possible, to try to be calm and to remind myself that different things and ways of life were here long before the internet, that I exist even if no one has sent me a message.
