There’s an important play coming up in the Dublin Theatre Festival, Gina Moxley’s The Crumb Trail, by Pan Pan Theatre Company. I hope you get to see it. I’m such a fan of the company that I was asked to write the programme note, which was a pleasure. While writing it, I had to reflect on the impact of the internet on my life, and I came to some rather dark conclusions.

It’s tough to articulate it, because although it may be a common experience, it is also largely unconscious. And trying to dig up what’s buried in your psyche is an unpleasant business, it’s like hunting for a corpse by following your nose. Something stinks, it’s unnerving, but it’s not obvious. It’s a low-grade anxiety that you catch a whiff of every now and again.
I once was woken up every other night at 3.01am, and I couldn’t figure out why. I am blessed with the ability to sleep usually, but for a few weeks the experience dominated my life, because sleep ceased to be guaranteed. But it was intermittent, so after one night’s full sleep I’d forget about it, only to find myself a couple of nights later being dragged into consciousness to stare at the clock saying 3:01. I tried to figure out what was the cause, but in the middle of the night my head isn’t the clearest. Was it the central heating kicking in on a timer? A neighbour leaving for work slamming the door? Couldn’t figure it out. Gradually, the knowledge that I was not heading for a guaranteed full night’s sleep took its toll. I couldn’t drift off, I couldn’t relax. I became sort of dishevelled inside, and tetchy, and out of sorts. Eventually I figured it out. I set my alarm for 2.55am, and listened. Sure enough, at 3.00, a very low beeping came from somewhere in my room. It was a travel alarm in my suitcase at the bottom of my wardrobe, set at that time to wake me to catch a plane home from the last time I had been away.
It’s as vague as that, as intermittent, the disquiet I feel about the internet. Not the practical stuff, the banking or the plane tickets or the news. And research and entertainment is fun too, the Youtubes and Wikipedia and the googling. All that is wonderful, even though there is so much bile and venom and chaff to sift through.
It’s about my interaction with others, through social networking, instant messaging, online chat, and dating sites.
On face value, such interactions add to my life. I share a joke or a video online with my friends, it’s instant and fun. I go rooting around the 1911 census online and share my discoveries with others, who then tell me the stories behind their ancestors and what they’ve discovered. I ask in my status line if anyone wants to go see a movie or go to a show, and I get responses. I hear about parties or festivals and exhibitions online, and I go to them, and know who else is going. I keep up to date with the news from my cousins, spread all over the world. Friends who are travelling on the other side of the planet might as well be next door, I can see how they are getting on every day, and see their photographs almost as soon as they are taken. On a sadder note, I’ve learned about people’s deaths online, and passed on the news to people who hadn’t heard.
So far, so good. It’s all so plausibly social.
When it comes to dating sites, I’ve given up on them, however. And my problem with them is a concentrated version of the flaw in online social networking with friends.
It is this: what did we do before the internet? What was so wrong with it? What have we lost in the transition? Because socializing and keeping in touch used to be part of everyday activities that served us perfectly well for eons.
I’m not a Luddite. But with every advance in human civilization, there is a drawback. And we only really notice what we’ve been deprived of when it begins to hurt – like not getting a particular vitamin in a new diet that tastes amazing. Over time, something begins to go wrong with your health. It’s vague and unsettling and hard to pinpoint.
Keeping in touch with people used to be done in company. Whether it was in a pub or chatting with neighbours or simply chatting on the phone, the information we swapped was part of a matrix of interactions that only happens when you are actually talking to people. Our tolerance levels of other people’s personalities and idiosyncrasies had to be quite high, but we never noticed it.
You’d never walk into your local and have only one request on your mind, that you would announce as you came into the pub. “Who wants to see the Tarantino with me tonight at 7.30?” If you think of it literally happening, it seems quite absurd. Would you turn on your heels if no one wanted to go with you? If you found someone who did want to go, would you leave together right there and then to see it? No, you wouldn’t. The very idea would be absurd. You would be meeting your friends to spend time with them. Chatting. About the weather, about NAMA, about the X-factor, their latest break up or holidays or anything else. The primary purpose is, of course, truly communal: taking people as you find them, and seeing what happens. You’ve no agenda, but you’re meeting a basic human need, to hang out. And if a friend is being a bit of a bore, or a bit down, you still pass the time with them. They’ll be in better form next time. It’s a basic kindness, a basic generosity of spirit. You give of yourself your actual presence, and you get the same in return. What comes out of a night such as that might be a pleasant surprise. You might meet a new friend of a friend that you like - you might even want to ask them out. It happens organically. Naturally.
Of course I still have nights like that. I’m not a complete geek. But I know if I didn’t have the internet, I’d be out socializing much more. And I think I’d be far more content with myself and my life.
The internet seems social, as I say, but it’s actually a way of controlling your life and your interactions to such a degree that ordinary “passing the time” socializing seems too much like hard work. When it comes to dating, it gets quite grotesque. Relationships are built not on a negotiated checklist of sexual preferences, but quite simply on a sensation of ease that you stumble upon, when you meet someone and there’s a mutual attraction. If it feels easy, and the body language is good, and you can have a laugh together, you will want to spend more time discovering the person, and, hopefully, vice versa. It’s a slow, tentative, gentle process, because it has to be. Not for everyone, I grant you, but for me. For all the fact that I used to be a webmaster and still design blogs for my friends, the internet is just plain wrong for me when it comes to dating. I need time, plenty of time, to get to know someone. And the internet just doesn’t offer that - it’s all about the instant moment, scratching an itch.
The internet allows us to control our interactions in a way that is impossible in the “real” world. We set the agenda, and it is based on our want, our need, our taste, our hunger. There is one thing that is guaranteed to magnify our desire, our sense of lack, our need for connection, and that is when we focus on it, to try to satiate it. Desire is an ourobouros - a snake that eats itself.
Online, we ignore those who don’t immediately satiate that need, respond to our joke, reply to our message on a dating site, or like our facebook status update. We can spend an evening interacting like that and by the end of it we’re still on our own. We’ve been mentally stimulated, but emotionally we’ve been in a vacuum. It’s a curious, subtle deprivation. And the only symptom of it is an unease, a restlessness, an anxiety. A tiny alarming sound in the middle of the night.