CAUGHT in the WEB

If there’s one thing the World Wide Web allows you to do it is to contact your inner child. I don’t necessarily refer to the plethora of games available for download or for on-line play, though they of course make their contribution to the sense of the web being a seemingly infinitely large toyshop. It’s rather that the web encourages you to skip around and to indulge intense but brief enthusiasms in a very childlike way.

Looking down my lists of bookmarked sites, I am struck by the unfamiliarity of some of them and the nostalgia of others. In the latter category are those sites that I happened upon and for a time thought were indispensable. I guess such sites also appear in the former category. At any rate, I certainly remember being drawn into threads of argument on some of these sites and imagining that the attraction of such jousting would never subside. Equally there are sites from which I eagerly downloaded stuff – music, programs, information, gewgaws of various kinds – and to which, capriciously, I have not returned.

I don’t think this is because, in my old age, I am becoming – or reverting to being – a total flibbertigibbet (though that may well be the case). Rather, I think it is because the web and its delights are incorporeal. If you are a collector of objects in the real physical world, they only go out of sight and then perhaps out of mind if you pack them away. In other words, you make a conscious effort to relegate their status for whatever reason. On your computer desktop, you have various means of storing material, programs, links and other notional acquisitions but these storage places – bookmarks, icons, files and folders – can easily slip out of sight without you necessarily meaning to mislay them.

I am occasionally haunted by a childhood experience that ought to have taught me something about human responsibility but probably didn’t. Living within easy access of relative countryside, I was always exploring various natural habitats and often catching creatures. One day, I brought home a frog in a jam-jar, which I placed on a shelf in the conservatory. I don’t have any sense of how long it was before I thought again of the frog and remembered that Mummy had said I would need to attend to its needs if I intended to keep it. Needless to say, it was dead, having expired upside down in the jam-jar. It was the ignominy of dying upside down that most mortified me. I remember feeling bereft that no way was left to me to make it up to the forlorn creature, save to give it a decent burial.

My iMac is stiff with inverted frogs in jam-jars. Maybe if they beeped to be fed, like a Tamagotchi, I would remember their existence. Perhaps if they ever start to threaten the memory capacity of my iMac, I will release them back into the wild. But the reproach that they embody is quite as keen as the reproach presented to my childhood self by the deceased frog. For, forgotten and neglected as they are, these footprints of past computing activity represent hours of time spent in some pursuit that, by any objective standard, was and still is futile. When I was young, television still seemed quite a big deal and my parents’ generation, who had grown up without television, were very apt to consider “looking in” (as we called it then) a terrible waste of precious time that could and should be spent on something considerably more significant/creative/personal/ dutiful/productive/respectable. Now we gleefully swap early telly memories and sigh about the golden age of broadcasting that we were lucky enough to have consumed.

I fear that the time-frittering to which vestiges of old web-surfing activity attest is unlikely ever to be parlayed into rosy memory. Like all screens, the computer is a terrible enticement to become dazzled by lights and moving images. As we all develop curvature of the spine, cauterize our eyesight and lose the use of our legs, we are still too enthralled by the magic of the web to see that what we are doing, most of our waking hours, is utterly fruitless.