The Web Ebb

I'm coining that, by the way. If this becomes a real thing, then I'm the first one who came up with it. Even if someone else has used it, I testify that I haven't heard of it, so I came up with it independently. Anyway, on with the show.

Lately, I've noticed that some of my friends are either thinking of leaving Facebook or outright leaving it. Most of my friends have either closed down their MySpace or at least stopped using it. Five years ago, I would have seen five to ten of my friends on instant messenger at any given time, and now I see maybe two or three.

I don't know whether this is a real trend or just something in my demographic. I know that my generation, the ones in their mid to late twenties, was the first to be immersed completely in the digital age. I was around eleven or twelve when I first really started getting into computers: the internet, email, that sort of thing. I remember when I fell for one of the first "Bill Gates will send you money if you forward this to all your friends" ploys. I remember the days I would type in a topic, add .com, and see what came up. Those were the days before Google, when WebCrawler, Lycos, and Excite were my main search engines. Within a few years, everyone I knew had instant messenging and email. And a few years after that, we started hearing about just how plugged in we are. I've heard it said that the computers have gone from another activity you do to the way we live.

But these days, it seems like that mad rush into the digital frontier, the topic of so many TV specials and documentary films, is slowing down. Maybe it's across the board and maybe it's just those of us who have been immersed in it for more than a decade, but it feels like people are starting to come up for a breath. I've heard it said many times that the internet age sneaked up on us, and we found ourselves plugged in without realizing how far in we'd gone, but I think that awareness is becoming more common. We've been jacked in for so long that we're starting to see the effects it's really had on our lives--and we're starting to pull back.

I won't claim that I'm starting to use the computer less, just that my desire to do so has waned. I still get anxious if I go more than a couple of hours without checking my email. I still check Facebook at least three times a day. But when I do so, I spend much less time on it. I visit my favorite sites out of habit, but I don't stay long. I've stopped playing massively multiplayer online games and online RPGs. I'm no longer really interested in having conversations with people I've never met. That novelty has long since worn off.

I noticed a smaller web ebb a few years ago when people stopped using MySpace and blogs quite as much. For a while out of high school and into college, it felt like a half dozen of my friends had regular blogs. These days, no one I know posts more than once a week. Sure, there are sites like Twitter, but I don't know anyone in my age range who's really jumped into that. In particular, I feel like we are less and less likely to all get excited about something new, getting on some new service or program.

It's possible the web has become just so integrated into our lives that it's no longer exciting, but I don't think that's it. I think we're genuinely starting to drift away from our computers. In some small way, I think the real world is starting to have that novelty effect that the digital world had for us fifteen years ago. We've gone so long plugged in that unplugging has become the new frontier.