We all have at least one friend who sends us memes at all hours of the day and night, consistently uses new word creations and abbreviations that were born on the World Wide Web (and are only used there by most), and could give a ten-minute presentation on the latest Twitter drama at any time. Maybe we are that person ourselves. Maybe we, too, are chronically online.
The term chronically online pretty much points straight to its meaning - chronically online means being online virtually whenever the situation allows. And sometimes even when the situation doesn't really allow it. Chronically online is to look at the cell phone last thing before going to bed and first thing after waking up. Chronically online is scrolling through the TikTok feed while watching Netflix on the tablet. Chronically online is looking at Instagram stories on the side while visiting a café with friends or writing messages that can wait at the dinner table with family. The king category of chronically online is probably the sadly clichéd image of the couple sitting silently across from each other in a restaurant - because they're both mesmerized by their phone screens.
In this day and age, we might all be a bit chronically online. This doesn't always have to be a bad thing, but if online media consumption becomes excessive, it can have a negative impact on real life. The almost uninterrupted use of the Internet is only one part of the phenomenon. We've all experienced it: discussions held in online forums unrelated to people's real-life problems, so-called online activism, in which fans of series, books, movies or video games start to antagonize each other if they don't like an opinion on the medium they love, and much more. The more people focus on this online world, the stronger the consequences seem to be. For example, 'Urbandictionary' formulates quite drastically: chronically online is 'a term used for an extremely sensitive and selfish person who is so consumed by Cancel Culture and the Internet that they no longer have any connection to real life [...] their goal is to make life easier for everyone and eradicate all forms of 'hate' and '-ism', when in reality they only made it worse.”
Chronically online and our view of the world
While an increasingly large part of our lives takes place on the Internet, there is an interesting trend that many Internet discussions (even heated ones) have little or almost no relevance in real life. While the Internet naturally provides space for important debates on relevant and debatable topics, many conflicts that are fought with much passion and anger are essentially meaningless and inconsequential. This creates a strangely distorted parallel world that contains most (if not now virtually all) aspects of the real world, but things are frequently given a very different degree of importance.
Perhaps this is why many debates conducted on the Internet somehow seem a little removed from the real world. It starts with a Creator who was called transphobic just because he made it clear that he himself is not transsexual, and goes all the way to the shocking popularity of the notion that it is elitist and classist to want to wait until you are financially secure enough to afford a family in the first place before planning one.
Even if the basic intent (to denounce transphobia or classism) isn't wrong, using these (and other terms) inaccurately as a killer argument in petty online disputes only causes them to gradually lose relevance and push real debates on these issues into the background. Or as Rebecca Jennings put it in a Vox article, 'It's easy to use the language of social justice to justify anything we want, and by doing so, weakens real, meaningful activism.'
Chronically online and our attention
As we move around the Internet, we are constantly bombarded with information. And whether information shocks us or entertains us, whether we are enthralled by it or would rather not have heard about it, information takes up our attention. It sounds trite but that doesn't mean it doesn't matter. Attention, like time, is a finite resource. We can't save it or buy it, but we can use it wisely. Turning our attention now and then to things that don't serve a productive purpose isn't bad. What is bad is when we try more and more often to divide our attention among more and more sources of information: humans are not designed to take in multiple pieces of information at the same time on a deeper level. So we divide our attention among them, which leads to everything receiving only superficial attention. Over time, it becomes increasingly difficult to focus attention on one object and sustain it over time - in short, to concentrate. This problem is further exacerbated because social media platforms in general, but especially short-content formats such as those on TikTok, immediately release dopamine when we use them. This means that our brains keep rewarding us for our usage behavior. The reward for lengthy, strenuous tasks (such as writing a term paper or working on a demanding project at work), on the other hand, is much longer in coming. Accordingly, these activities are much less interesting and require increasing amounts of effort as we become more accustomed to our steady supply of TikTok dopamine. We then tend to prefer the activity that makes us a little bit happy right away over the one that will only pay off in the future.
Pulling the plug - the solution?
The simplest solution, though not the easiest to implement, would be to get radical: simply uninstall all social media platforms forever. Better yet, delete all accounts. Or even better yet, ditch the smartphone altogether right away and switch to a 'dumb' phone to keep Internet use to an absolute minimum.
In fact, in addition to the usual tips for coping with Internet addiction (app limits, etc). you can also find a much more rigorous track: delete everything. Not just Twitter, Instagram and TikTok. Netflix and even Spotify have to go, too. To be really consistent, abolish home Wi-Fi access and use mobile data - to force yourself to use the Internet only for the bare essentials.
Inevitably, the question arises: Is this really the solution? And what's so bad about using Spotify to listen to music anyway (that is, aside from the fact that artists see little money on the streaming platform - but that wasn't even the point of criticism)? Do I really have to give up everything that the Internet and digital media have to offer - just to avoid the Internet and digital media at all costs?
Chronically offline - and still not perfect
People often act as if there's no middle ground between the extremes. It's either, 'I scroll through social media five hours a day, three of them right before bed, causing me to wake up late and be tired the next day and miss my job interview and my future goes down the drain,' or 'While on the go, I can only listen to music on a Walkman.'
Very revealing regarding the (un)necessary radicalism of anti-online efforts is a 2013 article by Paul Miller in The Verge, in which he reports on his internet-free year. He describes how, after initial difficulties, he was on a high for a while and began to enjoy the internet-free time. But even that wore off after a while, and he found other ways to distract himself and avoid his obligations. He writes, 'Reading a good book required motivation, whether I had the Internet as an alternative or not. Leaving the house to meet people took just as much courage as it used to. By the end of 2012, I had learned to make a new kind of bad decision without using the Internet.' (You can read Miller's full post here.)
There's no denying that the Internet makes it easier to whittle away a few hours. It's a simple quick distraction that just about everyone carries around in their back pocket these days. And yes, this form of distraction is not only more fruitless than spending time dusting or staring holes in the air - it can also affect us in the long term.
At the same time, this doesn't mean that without the Internet we're moving to a higher level of existence. We find certain tasks difficult or unpleasant, whether the lure of the cell phone is waiting for us or not. Some things we will always want to put off because we would simply rather not do them - because they are no fun, exhausting, the risk of failure looms. In that sense, maybe the Internet is a tool to something we would do anyway. A tool that is perhaps just a little too easily accessible to us.
If we just start banning ourselves from cell phones and social media without an alternative plan, we'll open up other ways to waste the freed up time. Perhaps it makes more sense overall to fill life with other activities and pursuits first, and develop methods of completing difficult tasks, and first see if the smartphone might play a slightly less important role directly. It's no coincidence that the rule of thumb is that it's easier to break bad habits by replacing them with good ones than to go cold turkey. App limits, conscious screen-free time (especially before going to bed), or even (temporarily) logging off from socials can be an important help here.
Conclusion
Being online can be fun, useful, and by no means always bad. Taking a look at your Instagram feed in the waiting room or on the train or scrolling through TikTok after dinner is not problematic in principle. It's just pretty easy to reach a (possibly) critical usage level.
Being constantly online damages our ability to focus and comprehend complex issues. This makes it increasingly difficult to tackle unpleasant or difficult tasks. At the same time, we may also be so distracted that not only the unpleasant but also the beautiful things in life pass us by. Excessive use of the Internet can, in extreme cases, ultimately even cause us to adopt a distorted view of reality, to perceive the world as excessively hostile and every personal faux pas by an individual as a manifestation of a structural problem. Our worldview can be helped just by leaving our ancestral bubble and getting news from reliable sources. And to save our concentration span, we don't have to renounce the Internet completely either - there would be thousands of other ways to fritter away time and avoid unpleasant tasks. To combat excessive procrastination, it may help to break tasks down into small, quickly achievable packages. If you find that without social media you feel a sense of emptiness in your life, you should try to find alternatives. For example, go for a walk, try a new sport or something similar.
However, one thing should never be forgotten: not everything our brain wants is always good for us, and we have to trick ourselves a time or two in order not to lose focus on what's really important.