A limit to our love...

...of the Internet.

Looking at all of my suggestions of YouTube videos and other ways to spend time on the Internet, it’s arguable that I have an unhealthy attachment. One reason why I decided to blog for The Chronicle may or may not be the fact that I wanted to justify the time I spend online.

I’m definitely not alone though: the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project recently conducted a study that found 53 percent of individuals aged 18 to 29 go on the Internet purely for fun or to kill time.

This is a number clearly on the rise, a trend that can be in part explained by high speed broadband connections, the popularity of cultural phenomena such as memes and YouTube, video on demand services such as Hulu and of course social networking sites such as Facebook.  And the trend is present across all socioeconomic classes.

The question though is: should we be alarmed? Going off of my own observations, sitting in large lecture classes and seeing Facebook and online shopping sites on countless computer screens: yeah, it might be a problem.

Kenneth Land, Professor of Demographic Studies and Sociology, provided a more nuanced view in an email Dec. 10.

“People have always found some way to have fun or pass the time, so perhaps going online just substitutes for some other activity such as mindlessly watching television," he wrote. "We also have more ‘leisure time’ today than in prior centuries when it was necessary to spend more time on survival and maintenance tasks.  Perhaps going online emerged just in the right era.  Of course, there can be a downside to spending too much time online, which might lead to general social concerns and problem definition.  We do not, however, seem to be at [that] stage as yet.”

The Internet is one of the most powerful tools today, in that it presents us with the possibility of the instantaneous exchange of information. A lot of times the usefulness of these exchanges is questionable, seeing all the memes and YouTube videos friends post on each other’s Facebook walls.  But as with all things, the key seems to lie with striking a healthy balance.