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Disconnected

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
Recently my wife and I went on a trans-Atlantic cruise. It takes but six days for these big ships to get to land (typically they stop at the Azores or Madeira) and for those six days there is only satellite-based Internet access, for which they charge dearly.

So, for six days, I was without net connection.

It was an interesting experience for someone who has been more or less continuously connected since around 1986, having had the privilege of working at a university over the intervening years. I found I missed two things most: community and information.

Community, of course, means Mythic Scribes, along with other forums, but also means keeping in touch with family and simply the usual traffic of daily business. I'm retired, so at least there's no more work traffic. I was all right with the loss of community, but I certainly felt it. While there are a few thousand other people on a cruise ship, they're all strangers. It was like it used to be, pre-Internet, being in a foreign city. I happened to be reading one of O'Brian's novels and was struck by the radical contrast with a time only two centuries ago when news from home might be months old.

All that was more or less expected. More of a surprise was the information angle. I've noted this before, but it was really driven home over those six days. Living in a world of constant connectivity and deep searches, there's almost no such thing as wondering. Any time I wonder what something means, where a word comes from, how the Titanic compares to the Norwegian Epic (our ship), I just look it up. The condition of not knowing, so prevalent in past generations, is coming close to vanishing. I didn't like it. In fact, it quickly got to the point where I started a list: things to look up once I get connected again.

These two experiences, lasting only those six days, continue to resonate with me. We have transformed our interior world even more profoundly than the external world. Future historians may well mark the advent of the Internet as being as significant--or even more significant--than the Industrial Revolution.
 

Futhark

Inkling
Ah yes, the Information Age. “It is estimated that the world's capacity to store information has reached 5 zettabytes in 2014.[7] This is the informational equivalent of 4,500 stacks of printed books from the earth to the sun.“
Information Age - Wikipedia

It used to be that finding any information was slow, now it’s more a case of finding specific information. But when you do, you just bookmark that b*#&$$.

This info brought to you by a quick google search.
 

pmmg

Myth Weaver
Ive been disconnected for the last two days and getting reconnected is feeling like a chore. Ill catch up soon though and it will be like it never even happened.
 

CupofJoe

Myth Weaver
I love being disconnected. I try to do a week, once a year. And I try to do mini disconnects every week.
I had a bad case of FOMO and had to do something about it. I love the instant connectivity to people all over the world but I think it has a bad effect on the psyche.
I've been watching a programme on 1066 and the time it took the news to spread to people was an interesting fact about what happened.
 

Insolent Lad

Maester
I'm on a satellite connection all the time, living out in the sticks (without cell reception to speak of either unless I go up the road a mile or so), so I have to be careful of my expensive bandwidth. I'm semi-disconnected, maybe. And then, odd weather can knock it out completely and I'll be disconnected for hours or days. Not too frequently—just when I have something really important to do online!

I get by and don't mind not being a 'normal' modern always-connected person. I never stream stuff. Way too much bandwidth. So I'm not keeping up with some of the stuff others seem to take for granted. Chances are I get more writing done as a result. At least that is what I tell myself.
 

Firefly

Troubadour
I'm on a satellite connection all the time, living out in the sticks (without cell reception to speak of either unless I go up the road a mile or so), so I have to be careful of my expensive bandwidth. I'm semi-disconnected, maybe. And then, odd weather can knock it out completely and I'll be disconnected for hours or days. Not too frequently—just when I have something really important to do online!

I get by and don't mind not being a 'normal' modern always-connected person. I never stream stuff. Way too much bandwidth. So I'm not keeping up with some of the stuff others seem to take for granted. Chances are I get more writing done as a result. At least that is what I tell myself.

I applaud you. That is awesome.

I don't know. There are benefits to the internet, in small doses, but I've increasingly tried to distance myself from it over the last year or so. Mythic Scribes is one of the few things left I haven't killed, because I need my craft talk and I can't really get that offline, but I've found most of the stuff I used to use it for was in a lot of ways more damaging to my life than it was positive. I don't you can accidentally pour away so much time into things that feel important in the moment but are really pointless. I need that time! I need to be writing, and reading aloud to my siblings, and enjoying nature, and SLEEPING... And none of that stuff gets done when the little screen is on.

It's so much harder to get the things I want to do done when my brain knows that the low energy, high reward activity of wasting time online is always available. Most days, it takes a ridiculous amount of cajoling and procrastinating to get myself to open up my stupid word document, but I notice that on sundays, the one day of the week I've never allowed myself to do anything recreational online (as part of my religious observance) I can barely keep myself from the keyboard.

It's enough to make me think, really wonder what the opportunity cost is of using the internet for anything more than necessities. I feel like my generation is missing out on a lot of opportunities to develop skills and talents and general human-ing ability, and I worry what the consequences will be.

I'm not going to have access to any sort of devices at all for the next 3-4 days, the longest I've gone in awhile, and I'll be curiously observing myself the whole time to see what the effects are... Wondering if it might not be worth it to just ditch them entirely for a month or so when I get back and try and REALLY get some stuff done.
 

Demesnedenoir

Myth Weaver
What social connectivity I have, outside of with readers, wouldn’t bug me much, the loss of research at one’s fingertips... that would cause anxiety after a time, but I’d adjust. But I know I’d get a lot more writing done with no internet. No doubt about it. I might double production to 5-6k words day, heh heh.
 

Ban

Troglodytic Trouvère
Article Team
What social connectivity I have, outside of with readers, wouldn’t bug me much, the loss of research at one’s fingertips... that would cause anxiety after a time, but I’d adjust. But I know I’d get a lot more writing done with no internet. No doubt about it. I might double production to 5-6k words day, heh heh.
But would that increased productivity measure up in quality to your current output? That's not a rhetorical question, I'm genuinely curious. As someone who has grown up on the internet, my writing process is largely symbiotic. I write with ten tabs open. Some about relevant topics, others to find related words and synonyms and usually at least one tab to translate (Dutchman). Add to that all of the creative reading and listening I do online, which we all know is part of the writing process, and I think my writing would indeed grow in size, but the quality would go down rapidly.
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
I fancy myself with a foot in both worlds. I was in my early 30s when the personal computing revolution hit. I was trained as a medieval historian, but my day job for thirty years was as a PC support tech and then webmaster at a university. I was online early--Compuserv, BBS, Bitnet.

I won't attempt to argue quality, but my writing would be different. I'm not at all sure in what way, but I'm a child of Toffler--the medium does affect the work. It strikes me that being connected means more to the writer than to other kinds of artists. For musicians it affects the marketing side most strongly; no longer does a musician have to labor in isolation just because he was born in a small town. Nor does he have to move to New York like Bob Dylan and thousands of others. There's samples, of course, and videos--all that enriches, but I don't think it changes much. Still less does online affect how a painter or sculptor works. But for writers it's profound. For me, the research angle is one major factor. Another is being able to lay hands on my work almost whenever and wherever. No longer do we have to wait to get back to our workspace in order to work. Sure we could always carry pen and paper, but we couldn't very well carry the entire novel-in-progress plus all the world building notes. It's just different.

As for interruptions and such, honestly I get interrupted more often by real-world things than by electronic things. Walk the dogs, what're they barking at, oh it's a delivery, cook dinner, noisy kids outside, and so on. Electronic interruptions? Click, and they're silent.
 
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Demesnedenoir

Myth Weaver
Most of my online time is not directly writing related, so nothing would really be altered much. And search engines are so geared toward ads these days I waste too much time sorting through the refuse as I do finding useful info, heh heh.

But would that increased productivity measure up in quality to your current output? That's not a rhetorical question, I'm genuinely curious. As someone who has grown up on the internet, my writing process is largely symbiotic. I write with ten tabs open. Some about relevant topics, others to find related words and synonyms and usually at least one tab to translate (Dutchman). Add to that all of the creative reading and listening I do online, which we all know is part of the writing process, and I think my writing would indeed grow in size, but the quality would go down rapidly.
 

Ban

Troglodytic Trouvère
Article Team
Can't say I ever have that problem Demesne. Seems like you're not googling enough, it's a skill to be honed ;)
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
Google's first page has become invested with paid content (paid links, really). There was an article about this recently, pointing out that the actual #1 slot now appears halfway or more down the first page, which has implications for people's businesses. It's one more argument in favor of DuckDuckGo or other search engines.

SEO has poisoned research as well, for a long time. In my field there are some really sloppy web sites that consistently rank high on search results simply because the site architects know how to optimize. But the medieval information there is thin, misleading, and without sources. And, back when I had my courses online, they scraped my content without acknowledgment. But search engines aren't about quality, they're about algorithms. The serious researcher needs to be aware of this and be willing to take the extra steps.

There are ways to make searching more effective. The best ones are listed here
Refine web searches - Google Search Help
I use the scope regularly when I'm doing bibliographic research. As in something like this:
"Charles of Anjou" bibliography site: .edu
This will return bibliographies from educational institutions about Charles of Anjou. If I want to extend it, I might do an OR with .org sites.

I miss Altavista.
 

Ban

Troglodytic Trouvère
Article Team
Are we only talking about standard google or also taking into account google scholar? The latter is meant for research purposes, and at least personally I haven't found trouble with it. Google itself is not geared towards quality, but towards a mass audience.
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
Google Scholar is free of the ad nonsense, but it mostly links to sites that are behind a paywall or require you be inside the academic community (which simply means your university is paying the freight). It's good, but not great. I just ran a search on Charles of Anjou and got a citation on the first page for an article on Charles VII and Francesco Sforza--two hundred years later. It was an article by an old professor of mine, so I clicked on it anyway and got a failure to redirect. Not exactly inspiring.

I tried again with the phrase "wendish revolt" and got things like a translation of Sorb poetry, peasant revolts in early modern Germany, and the revolt of the Netherlands. Again, not exactly inspiring.
 

Ban

Troglodytic Trouvère
Article Team
Hmmm that's sad to hear. I admittedly don't use scholar often, much preferring jstor or BASE, but jstor requires an account so is not accessible to everyone.
 
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