Eat your breakfast. The Internet can wait.

Posted by anthonykuo , Aug, 2009 @ 9:57 am

eat your breakfast, the internet can wait.

Ology network partner ZiggyTek tells the story of an alarming trend, and one that I’m occasionally guilty of myself. After six to eight hours of network deprivation — also known as sleep — people are increasingly waking up and lunging for cellphones and laptops, sometimes even before swinging their legs to the floor and tending to more biologically urgent activities.

This is my morning routine:

-Get Up

-Turn the computer

-Check Tweeter for Tweets, Check FB, Check e-mail

-Reply to each one

-Make Coffee

All this takes about half hour depending on how many replies I have to make. This is the first thing I do every morning, weekday or weekend. This is what’s happening in today’s day and age as highlighted by a New York Times article. [ZiggyTek]

Now it’s one thing to wake up at your normal hour and delay breakfast by a little bit to make time for social networking and email. But the same New York Times article talks about people who wake up early to use the Internet.

The trend is so widespread that it can be easily detected by looking at internet traffic trends. Arbor Networks, a Boston company that analyzes Internet use, says that Web traffic in the United States gradually declines from midnight to around 6 a.m. on the East Coast and then gets a huge morning caffeine jolt. “It’s a rocket ship that takes off at 7 a.m,” said Craig Labovitz, Arbor’s chief scientist.

Akamai, which helps sites like Facebook and Amazon keep up with visitor demand, says traffic takes off even earlier, at around 6 a.m. on the East Coast. Verizon Wireless reported the number of text messages sent between 7 and 10 a.m. jumped by 50 percent in July, compared with a year earlier. [NYT]

The effect of technology on us and our lifestyles has always been at the center of debate. People resist change, myself included. My first post at Ology was the same day the second Amazon Kindle was released, so I wrote about my resistance against the ebook movement. But that’s nothing new, and neither is this.

But the truth of the matter is that our brains and bodies are not built for the 21st century. They’re not even built for this millenium. We are highly tuned and optimized machines designed for the Stone Age, a time when the daily hunt and forage with the tribe was critical to survival. Take that away and we become fat and unsociable lumps, pretending to socialize while sitting motionless in front of a computer.

I’m not arguing for abstinence from the Internet. I’m asking for some moderation. Addiction to the Internet has been repeatedly parodied (South Park’s WoW episode), vilified (Chinese Internet addiction camps), and cautioned against (Bruce Willis’ new movie Surrogates), and for good reason. It’s ridiculous. We’ve turned something that is beneficial and necessary in reasonable doses into something harmful in excess because we can’t control ourselves.

THe bottom line? Go ahead and spend a few hours on Facebook, Twitter, reading blogs, and whatever other Web 2.0 things are availeble. It’s normal. But talk to your family once in a while. And eat your damn breakfast.

Tags: addiction, breakfast, facebook, habit, internet, internet addiction, rant, routine, stupid, twitter, web 2.0, WoW