Is it A blessing or a curse ?,this is the question.

Here’s today’s question & apparent conundrum.

Is the internet as a whole, and Youtube specifically, in some way bad for us – specifically our concentration, attention & mental health……is it good for us ?

I’m going to stick my oar in straight away and say that it’s both as, on the good side, it gives me a medium and a platform for blogging, writing and producing my own video content and yet bad at the same time for the various reasons which i’ll set out below.

I should say, right at the outset though, that in 2025 I intend to make a regular habit of having an internet fast once a week and my plan is to combine the information & stimulation fast with my regular food fast which iv’e slowly got into the habit of doing once a week. Call it a new years resolution if you want to couch it in those terms and, as with my physical fasting habit, I did consider the idea of starting off with an initial longer fasting period to help me go ‘cold turkey’ from the internet. The problem, if there is one, that I had to have a unplanned internet separation when I went to sea in 2019 and although it had a good outcome it did mean that there were several things that I obviously couldn’t do and had to wait for around a month to catch up with – things such as my blog for instance.

Although I was left with some residual effects from my first recognized stroke I was soon able to continue the Pathfinder project and engage my mind with lectures on the then newly launched Peterson academy. After my second stroke it wasn’t as clear what to concentrate on as it became obvious that the big Pathfinder caused me more problems to work on and I couldn’t seem to be able to follow lectures even when I was engaged with the subject : with one lecture series it seemed that I could only concentrate and maintain tight focus for 5 – 10 minutes per session so I couldn’t even retain enough new knowledge to benefit from the next chunk.

Today, iv’e chosen to put one whole lecture series aside because I just couldn’t keep up with it and i’m sad to say that it was one of Dr Peterson’s own lecture series : Dr P can be difficult to follow at the best of times so I switched camp and carried on with Bishop Robert Barron’s series and that has led me to Jonathan Pageau and his lectures about Christian symbolism – I actually spend more time now with lectures on his own website.

I did think that it was the direct effects of my strokes that caused me to have a poor attention span and equally poor concentration, I did definitely have some noticeable personality changes which i’m now doing my best to work around but I find it unwise and insufficient to blame my strokes entirely : it could also be what I do in my own life and maybe two other things play a part.

My first contention is that long periods spent on the internet, thus with continuous availability of stimulation and content that is specifically designed to grab our attention, acts in a similar way to the way that some addictions can and do act – just observe the many young people who can’t cope without continuous use of their ‘smart’ phones. I have, for example, seen ‘friends’ meet for coffee and then spend the entire time each in their separate little bubbles of cyberspace.

Iv’e done what research and reading that I can – the entertaining aspect of that whole approach being that iv’e essentially been asking the internet itself if it is bad for people – especially their mental health ?. The answers that I find are generally neutral except for where the internet directly fuels an addiction, one example being internet pornography and another being internet based gambling. It is definitely the case that bullying and shaming in some way are features of relational aggression and that the online world plays a part in that although there is also the oddly reversed world of selfies and online ‘look at me’ and see how wonderful is my life : I suspect showing an online persona that way is entirely false.

While I have cafes and coffee in mind I do also drink too much of the stuff…….

I find myself fortunate that I didn’t grow up with the internet and only came to it in adult life with, I hope, an already fully formed mind. What that partially points to is that i’m lucky enough to have grown up reading books and still do : i’m now one of those annoying old people who, when book and film are being compared, have to say that in my opinion the book is usually better. Lucky again that my first English teacher at Grammar school actually read to us a few minutes of J R Tolkien’s The Hobbit at the end of a class – he had a big booming Gandalf and a spooky Serkis-like Gollum voice.

My second contention is that the internet,specifically in the form of Youtube videos has and is changing our behaviour – to highlight this i’d like to give a couple of recent examples as personal evidence.

First. Recently I had to reverse my partners car out of the driveway we share with 3 other cottages – we reverse onto a narrow lane and there is no uphill visibility until the drivers view clears the corner of the last cottage. Now…we always edge out slowly because a veritable convoy of private hire vehicles use that lane as a private rat run such as not to have to drive through an area difficult due to average speed cameras.

On this occasion I edged out and immediately stopped because I saw a quick flash of a cyclist coming fast down the lane – he passed me but pulled in just a few yards downhill and I saw his hand fly to the GoPro camera mounted on his cycle helmet. I assumed straight away that his intention was to shoot some self justifying ‘confrontation’ video as I passed him but he was hard out of luck as all I was doing was turning and reversing straight back in. I later heard, the village grapevine. that one man whom I know had to take the selfsame cyclist aside and have a few words with him about his attitude on the road. It seems that he is just one of many cyclists and drivers who create situations which they can then film and use as confrontation videos on Youtube.

My second example is related but rather than actual confrontation shows to me how my own expectations of drivers and driving have been shaped by watching the same kind of video channels.

I spend at least an hour a day walking the lanes around where I live – they make for good exercise because the county (Cornwall) is a bit crinkly where we live. The lanes are also narrow and have poor visibility and I now have poor balance, poor gait and usually have to walk with a stick : I have slight hearing loss as well such that if a driver is coasting down the hill, or worse, driving an electric car, then I don’t sense them until they are right behind me and give an angry blast on the horn rather than a ‘here I am’ kind of toot from further back. If I get a gentle toot then I move aside as quickly as I can but if it’s an angry blast I shout back or give them ‘digicus impudicus’ – in other words a stiff single finger.

Firstly, I find that an angry blast on the horn is an occurrence with certain cars and certain types of driver, It isn’t only the owners of high end German saloon cars, white vans and ladies driving large Range Rovers……but is close enough that it becomes an expectation of potential conflict in my mind.

My own use of the internet is pretty broad in that I have my own website and my own Youtube channel so in that way i’m already making great use of it, the opposite side is that iv’e never had a Twitter (Now X) account and iv’e never felt the need to engage in that battlefield of ideas which, to my mind, best serves conflict and division directly via it’s algorythm although i’m persuaded that it’s slightly better now that it has less of an extreme echo chamber effect.

I can’t easily imagine, right now, leaving the internet completely and permanently although I do see good reason to turn it off at least once a week, every week and maybe even aim for a longer break when I have a few posts ready to go and several videos already scheduled.

Postscript.

This I think will be an unpopular end point to this post as it’s about the subject of the internet, free speech and our totalitarian state.

I say totalitarian state because I think it best to act as if we actually live in one. A bit like Jordan Peterson saying that he prefers to act as though God exists I find it best to act in such a way as to fully accept that we are in a totalitarian and ‘2 tier’ state which does act as if it had the right to poke it’s unwelcome nose into every aspect of our lives and, what’s more, to create it’s own religion which must be adhered to and seek to impose that with legalism.

One of the obvious losers is any sense we might have had that England is a country that respects truth, justice and free speech – or at least the freedom of expression. I find it true to say that we don’t have that freedom of expression or perhaps only when we are parroting the new religion. If we dare to speak or write against that then we are quite obviously a legal target and already defined by our government, in the shape of our own home secretary, a criminal. I don’t need to add here the many examples of people being arrested, tried and jailed for stating opinions that they hold to be true or just in saying the wrong thing to the wrong person or broadcasting such a thing, however transiently on the internet.

Several years ago, when the internet became routinely available, I had a discussion with a friend who held the view that the internet was even then altering our behavior when it came to communication via Email. The way he described it was as action without consequence – that you could easily hide behind the keyboard and say things that you would never say if the person you were arguing with or angry with was standing next to you in the pub : physical proximity and presence he thought made for a modicum of politeness and my final point (almost final) is that the internet has encouraged us to lose that politeness and the results are now bleeding out into many of our daily interactions. The end result, for now, is the karma that comes as a result of action without normal social interaction and even normal argument.

Here endeth the lesson for the day.

February 2025 update.

Since I wrote this piece several things have happened in the world of me and the internet, the end result of which is that iv’e deleted my Facebook/Meta profiles after my Marketplace account was hacked and in the same month I deleted, as far as I am able, my account with Pinterest.

In both cases it seems that somehow both accounts have been hacked or maliciously used by individuals or companies unknown, in the case of Facebook Marketplace I sudenly found out that I was apparently the seller of boats, work vans and motorcycles and started getting messages from would be buyers : as Facebook took no responsibility or interest I spent most of a morning messaging each potential buyer and warning them about what I thought might be fraudulent or simply some kind of scam. I had a short online conversation with one individual who told me that the supposed advert was a portal into a pornography site.

With my Pinterest account I had a message from that site telling me that my account was suspended because I had broken community guidelines – once again it seemed that somehow some images, perhaps pornographic and involving minors, had been posted via my account. The strange and rather worrying thing is that I have never posted anything at all on any pinterest page and only use the site while doing image searches…..as an example I have posted the kind of thing that I search for below.