It's not actually too bad...

There's a few interesting things in this strip that made me want to put it here... after the roflmao's of course. lol

1. "Constant novelty saps my initiative."
   • There's actually two parts of this that made me pause. Firstly, the concept that constant new stuff could or would affect someone's creativity and productivity negatively. I don't think this happens to me. I find it's the other way around: I discover new tools and find myself pulling them apart, thinking about how I would improve them if I had the time or the ability. Or thinking of new or weird (or usually just librarian-centric) ways of using them. That's the constant novelty that I experience in the net. Mere informational novelty doesn't really affect me since I'm immersed in it every day as a librarian... it's really functional novelty. "I can do what now? That's cool."
   • The second is a little more meta than that. I've never really thought of the Internet as being a source, or rather a particularly unique source, of constant novelty. In a way, that makes sense... Thinking about your stereotypical pre-Internet horse-and-carriage, steam-locomotive, stone-tool kind of existence, I guess there wasn't as much sudden change, regular mass communication, constant input as there is today. But although there seems to be a lot more info-producers around, once the printing press got up and running, there was still more information than the average person could absorb in a lifetime. We just see the lists and streams of it better and we can dig through piles of it that were not quite as reachable as before.
     
2. "I'm gonna try to spend a weekend at home without Internet."
   • Try? Ok, I like the Internet. Correction, I LOVE the Internet. I spend my whole day at work on it. I come home to it. I play games on it. I plan my day with it. I write with it. I read with it. But I've yet to reach a stage where I couldn't pull myself away from it. I could spend a whole weekend off the computer as easily as I could spend a whole weekend on it. And why would I want to? It would be like saying, "I'm gonna try to eat for week without refrigerating anything." You could do it, and it might be an interesting experiment but there's no real ethical consideration here, which is what seems to exist when people talk about using computer or Internet related tools. It's a computer people, not a TV with a keyboard!
3. "I give you an hour."
   • Again the sarcasm. Ok, it's for the benefit of the joke, but it disturbs me to hear people first rage about the evils of technology or their bewilderment at the draw of something online, then respond with absolute certainty that it has you in it's clutches! You either understand a phenomenon or you don't. You either see something as inherently and obviously harmful or you don't. Have faith in your fellow humans that we're not mindless and pitiable automatons!

I guess all the interesting bits were in that first panel. Then the funny happens. Leave it to me to destroy all the humour in it for you... Go subscribe to xkcd if you don't want my commentary! lol