The other day I deliberately changed my morning routine. I drank my morning coffee away from my computer – where I could sit and think. Sure enough a thought descended upon me…. “the internet is no longer useful to me”. This was both obvious, and a little bit disturbing at the same time. The more I have thought about it since the tru-er it has seemed.

Sure there are plenty of sites that are useful to me – but the internet itself – that random collection of things all hyperlinked together in an organic web used to be valuable. For almost any topic you could spend half an hour on ‘the internet’ and it would be hugely productive. Without trying too hard you would have a mix of current ideas linking to reference information, resources linking to resources that you could actually use – and even bookmark! At the end of the half an hour it would feel like ‘time well spent’. Greater use of the internet seemed to correlate with greater productivity (at least subjectively). Today, that is no longer the case. Every extra minute spent ‘just browsing’ the internet feels like another minute wasted.

So yes – I still use and need many sites on the internet for many things. But ‘the internet itself’ is no longer useful to me…