Why I’m not giving up the Internet for Holy Week
I was thinking about going completely offline this Holy Week (which essentially means Maundy Thursday to Good Friday) until the hypothetical Lenten pledge started to sound meaningless in my head. To simulate the Holy Weeks of my pre-Internet/pre-cable childhood — the stillness, the silence that becomes so loud that it crosses over to enlightenment — would be such a unique throwback thrill. It would also be a complete lie.
The Internet is a runaway train of clutter and noise and it’s not stopping for anyone, not even for the crucified Christ. It may go off-track into thinly-populated areas for a couple of days, but it would still be operational at “minimum” capacity, whatever that still means. If the world can’t fully pull off Earth Hour, then 48 hours of being unplugged from digital civilization seems infinitely more unrealistic. I have come to realize that I can no longer pretend that the Internet doesn’t exist during Holy Week. I can never go unplugged anymore. There is no turning back.
I do sort of miss those days when you could still go off the grid, not as a choice, but as a default state. I went through puberty in the early ‘90s, when summers fell right smack in the middle of those infamous Cory-era blackouts, which limited my media exposure to the animated series Cedie, the titular hero’s wide-eyed androgynous cherub stare the last electronically-generated image I would see before the power went out for the rest of the day. To fill the void, I would read volumes of encyclopedia, familiarizing myself with names of dinosaurs, NBA legends, and plants. I would get used to the enclosed acoustics of our car, the only place left where I could play my older siblings’ mixtapes. I would go on bike rides until every porch and every rust formation on every gate in our neighborhood was mapped out in my mind.
A friend of mine who grew up around the same time nearly lost it when she heard her 11-year-old daughter — who has an iPad, a laptop, and near-limitless access to malls — complain about being “bored” during summer. It made me think about all those summers I spent just staring literally into the darkness and how the definition of “bored” has been loosened like worn-out underwear over the years. Yet this is what it has come to: a generation perpetually tethered to a digital simulacrum of the entire world, still somehow capable of ennui.
LACK OF STIMULI
It is difficult for those of my generation, having lived through what relatively were the dark ages, to see boredom as anything other than the lack of accessible stimuli, but it is ultimately more than that. Boredom is the hardening of normalcy. It is that period when novelty becomes habit, when innovation becomes normative, when the thrill is gone. All across the vast universe of the Internet, we are plugged into its dizzying and ever-expanding array of portals — social media, forums, newsletters, dating apps, blogs — and they are all simultaneously never old and never new. Content is always fresh, regularly updated, and a perpetuation of a tedious cycle. Something happens, people pick up on it, it trends, attracts backlash, which attracts anti-backlash, effectively eating itself and dying. Tweet, rinse, repeat.
I see the proliferation of snark on social media as the sound of the Internet getting bored with itself. This is not to say that all of us who participate in it are fed up and are ready to jump offline. It is hard to pull the plug because while it may bore us, it also listens to us. The difference between being bored in 1990 and in 2015 is that you can complain about it with the whole world now.
If the goal of Holy Week (at least secularly) is introspection, then we may find as much of it online as we would off it. Social media is a library of the mundane details of our daily lives — where we ate last Friday, what we wore a month ago, what song we were obsessing over a year ago today — and as throwback app Timehop and yearend Facebook montages have demonstrated, we have amassed quite a collection, enough for significant periods of our lives to have been documented online. While we’ve been routinely and jadedly updating our social media accounts, we’ve been building our own crudely crafted memoir. Our memories have been digitized. We can reflect on the ways our lives have changed, the people we love, the moments we cherish, and our evolving passions by logging in. This is no longer an oxymoron 15 years into the 21st century.
Unplugging from the Internet for an extended period feels unnatural now, like having no electricity in 1990. My memory of that era now looks harmless and quaint, like a Wes Anderson movie. I vaguely remember how the absence of noise and distractions filled me with a veritable sense of self, how captivatingly magnified anything can be when projected against the void — songs, daydreams, longing. But I also definitely remember how that time sucked beyond words. If I’m going to be bored from now on, I’d rather do it online.
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