Twitter emerged as a form of instant blogging of microthoughts. More and more people got a smartphone - connecting them instantly to a deluge of febrile content, forcing them to cull and absorb and assimilate the online torrent as relentlessly as I had once. Facebook soon gave everyone the equivalent of their own blog and their own audience. And as the years went by, I realized I was no longer alone. I was, in other words, a very early adopter of what we might now call living-in-the-web. Related StoriesĪndrew Sullivan’s Advice for Beating ‘Distraction Sickness’ My brain had never been so occupied so insistently by so many different subjects and in so public a way for so long. I was in an unending dialogue with readers who were caviling, praising, booing, correcting. And at times, as events took over, I’d spend weeks manically grabbing every tiny scrap of a developing story in order to fuse them into a narrative in real time. Throughout the day, I’d cough up an insight or an argument or a joke about what had just occurred or what was happening right now. Each morning began with a full immersion in the stream of internet consciousness and news, jumping from site to site, tweet to tweet, breaking news story to hottest take, scanning countless images and videos, catching up with multiple memes. For a decade and a half, I’d been a web obsessive, publishing blog posts multiple times a day, seven days a week, and ultimately corralling a team that curated the web every 20 minutes during peak hours. I knew why I’d come here.Ī year before, like many addicts, I had sensed a personal crash coming. If it hadn’t been for everyone staring at me, I might have turned around immediately and asked for it back. I duly surrendered my little device, only to feel a sudden pang of panic on my way back to my seat. A woman in the front of the room gamely held a basket in front of her, beaming beneficently, like a priest with a collection plate. I was sitting in a large meditation hall in a converted novitiate in central Massachusetts when I reached into my pocket for my iPhone.
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