By Mike Corrigan

BN Columnist

Television was invented for Cro-Magnon man, and the Internet for Neanderthals. On television, your typical Cro-Magnon can click, and be entertained, or not. Whatever. Bottom line, Television Man knows he’s being coddled and often lied to, but he’s kind of soothed by the process. He’s used to it. It’s entertainment. After all, lies are the price of sleep and dreams. 

On the Internet, though, your Neanderthal can only point and click and be misinformed about something, or well-informed about things of dubious value; infotainment was invented on the Net. Google is a filter, but it’s often a filter of and for the lowest common denominator. And information in the real world is not often a form of entertainment. Taste is no test of the quality of information. Internet Man, therefore, is a prisoner of the propaganda he chooses, or that is chosen for him.

Screen time is addictive. So addictive that the State of New Hampshire has chosen to sue Meta for “purposely addicting children.” The addictive features include “infinite scrolling, auto-play features and near-constant notifications and alerts.” Similar features mark Internet use for adults, too. Sociologists say that adults should limit screen time away from work to two at most hours a day, to enhance socialization, child-rearing activities and in-person interactions. Home. Real community. Here are the values we can lose track of, if we are incautious.

The Internet used to live in a computer in a corner of the den or family room. Now, it not only has moved into all the other rooms in the house, the Internet can be carried around like a pampered baby, and often is. Many of us can’t seem to live without it; the winking screen assures us that we are still alive. It offers a vast landscape of entertainments and news. (Sometimes, that means “news.”) And it’s self-validating. Look, we can even keep checking our geographical position, down to the meter. See, there we are! See that dot, those coordinates? That’s us. We exist!

More than a half-century ago, Marshall McLuhan warned us about television, and though we didn’t listen very closely, or perhaps even much understand what he was mumbling about, we at least knew we had been warned. The Internet comes with no such warning labels. We have to be self-editors, and that’s a difficult freedom. Certainly, it can even feel more democratic; little-old you can even change the listings in Wikipedia if you want, to match your own version of reality. You can follow “friends” you have never met, you can send out tweets about your latest fast food meal, you can be tied to the blazingly-spinning world, and thus not be thrown off it…

And then, there are the AI apps, attended by largely unknown future effects. Much of all this seems useful and good, but who knows where AI will lead? So, we blunder on, stumbling in distraction, lost in a blinding blue glare washed by shifting shadows. Finally, we can’t live without the sun that makes those shadows; I have gone for years at a time without television, or without cable, at least. Cable wasn’t making me happy; it was only a way to distract myself from being present. My excuse for having the Internet now is that e-mail is so handy; but I briefly check Yahoo! “news” and several sports sites every day, and I surf and imagine I’m learning something... And there are always those famously cute cat videos. It all adds up to… distraction. Mostly, it feels okay, but it can be too much of a good thing. And then, there are the bad things…

Yes, the Net offers an infinity of useful features — but even they turn to be overkill. Whatever the slant, a good many of those features turn out to be addictive. If you go there for the news, you’re apt to be silo-ed by some algorithm. And then you’ll find a throbbing universe of misinformation and disinformation, posing as the truth…

All this screen time wears away the local tenor of our lives. We spend our time and money elsewhere; to shop on-line, for example, helps hollow out Main Street in our towns. The Internet holds out an offer of community, but in most cases, it isn’t a local community. The virtual world is a problem for me, and I expect for most of us: it has no intrinsic meaning and is somehow magically disconnected from real-world values. And yet, it has a placeness about it; it seems possible to live on-line, and some people do without really thinking about it. Behind the games and news of interest lie illusion and disillusion. Most of what we follow on our screens is only superficially about Now, and they certainly are not about Here. But we sleepily imagine it all to be somehow about us. And don’t we all most desire to matter in the Here and Now, to be up on everything, to be perpetually hip, forever entertained?

In pursuit of our own identities, we may stumble on, drugged, addicted, always trending elsewhere — and who among us can say where we are bound? Do we even really care that it’s hard to say where the virtual ends and the reality begins? Would we even change anything now if we could? New Hampshire is giving it a go.

Mike Corrigan of Bridgton was a long-time writer and editor of The Bridgton News. He won numerous Maine Press Association Better Newspaper Contest awards for column writing.