Distracting Ourselves Together
I was on my computer browsing the internet while sitting in Discord. My friends played World of Warcraft. I was refreshing Twitter and YouTube, reading headlines, doom-scrolling: distracting myself without purpose and to no concrete end. I had no desire to join them, but I did have a desire to sit and listen as they formed memories that would forget my backseat presence. Their gaming was my white noise, the same way my parents need NBC blaring on their TVs: the white noise of other people.
To exit Discord and browse without the umbilical connection felt unnatural, alien, wrong. Even if I wasn’t in voice chat I needed the Discord window open on my second monitor. My friends’ usernames are burned into my LED screen. Why?
I wanted to understand my addiction, why I have to have Discord open on my second monitor while I type these words. To do so I have to zoom out, chop people up—including myself—into categories, and then reassemble them with conceptual stitches.
My parents are in the category of those who don’t live online. They use the internet as a tool. They turn on their tablets or their Mac, order their photos off Shutterstock, throw money at Amazon, and then log off. For those who don’t live online the internet has variable purpose but its execution is singular. There is a beginning and an end; a powering on, a logging off.
