Are we spending too much time on the computer?

Before a recent trip to Chicago, my home computer network died and I was without DSL for a couple days. Since I now get my primary news and information from the Web, I went through a day of near panic, but it also made me reassess the time I spend on the computer. Many of us live a digital lifestyle. The Web has brought a lot more information and ways to connect for people, but in the dog days of summer I have been thinking about the way we spend our days. Information technology is about efficiency, not meaning; technology is a tool to deliver information. I spend eight hours a day on a computer: I write, exchange emails, go on social networking sites like FaceBook, and search for information on news sites, Twitter, and other voices. In some senses, the efficiency of the delivery should make us less prone to being on the computer, but the need for immediacy has had the opposite impact. Getting information and virtually connecting with people are not unpleasant experiences, per se, but am I (and millions of other people) gaining as much pleasure and knowledge from these experiences as we would hope? If I am spending eight hours, or more, a day on the computer, is that leaving enough time for other pursuits? I am a huge fan of technology, but is there enough value-add, as they say in Silicon Valley, to justify the amount of time we all spend on the Web?

On my plane ride to Chicago I decided to write down the top ten experiences during the week. I decided to exclude anything that I had done with my children and wife because they would obviously dominate the list. It was a relatively slow week as summer winds down, but here were my top ten events:

Drinking a well-made Sidecar; going through some old photographs; browsing for books at my local bookstore; talking football with my father; preparing a complicated meal; finding a difficult-to-find book on the Los Angeles Public Library Website; chatting, and laughing with, the airport shoeshine guy about the evolution of the shoeshine business; reading the first 100 pages of John Le Carre’s A Most Wanted Man; playing pick-up soccer with a multicultural crowd and thinking about how soccer defines the world; interviewing some sources for an article.

Throughout the week I spent time on the computer and was satisfied with the information I found, and it was nice to connect with friends virtually. But none of the computer experiences made the top ten, except when I found a book on the LAPL Website; I had been searching for the book for more than year.

Being on the computer is a big part of my workday, but based on my own personal meaning assessment, it would be reasonable to cut down my computer time by half. (Write down your own top ten important events and see if I am wrong.) Web 2.0’s cultural hierarchy can be defined by speed and one-upsmanship, in which people who know something a couple minutes before everyone else, or visit the coolest sites, or provide the most clever lines on a social networking site become the tribe leaders. Not being on the computer will leave you out of many conversations. Perhaps we have gone overboard, and the pursuit of speed has created a loss of meaning on and off-line. I don’t think the satisfaction level matches the time spent staring at a computer.