Important Things The Internet Taught Me This Week

NEWS!

1. Heidi Klum and Seal are separating
2. Katherine Heigl wore a daring one-shouldered dress to the premiere of her new movie
3. The former Penn State head coach died and – now that he’s dead – we must suddenly highlight his triumphs instead of his sex scandals
4. Two celebrities wore the same dress just days apart!
5. A cop helped deliver a baby
6. The captain of that Italian cruise ship is a scoundrel
7. Justin Beiber and Selena Gomez got new haircuts (OMG!)
8. So did former Sex And The City star Cynthia Nixon!
9. Obama’s State of the Union address cautioned the middle class.
10. You can see what Snooki looks like without make-up
    
    

These were some of the headlines on my Yahoo! homepage this week. Now, mind you, I didn’t actually read any of the articles that went along with these headlines (hence the probable spelling mistakes). But who needs to?

OK, maybe I should read the one about the State of the Union, but then I’ll probably just feel stupid because I don’t understand what’s being said, and I’ll get depressed about the things I do understand.

Which is why I tend to focus on the shallow headlines, like those pertaining to celebrities. But then I’m irritated about what constitutes ‘newsworthy’ news, so I don’t read those articles much, either. And if I do, I just feel disgusted with myself for having succumbed to an interest in superficial gossip.

I am reminded of something I read in that Free Range Kids book about a heightened paranoia over safety once cable TV started. Because cable TV brought 24-hour news channels, and – if you have to fill twenty-four hours with news, you’re going to have to find every single sensationalist story you can and milk it for all it’s worth.

Which is, I think, what the Yahoo! homepage is doing. Every time I get online, there’s a new headline about something stupid and trivial that I truly could live without knowing. But the good people at Yahoo! need to keep me sucked in, so they’re constantly finding new things to showcase. And it’s a great marketing ploy, seeing as how it often works: I find myself clicking on an article to learn more about Beyoncé’s outrageous delivery demands, which then links me to a slideshow of her red-carpet fashions over the years, which sends me on to a photo comparison of best and worst Oscar dresses since 1968. I end up wasting an hour before I realize I haven’t even checked my e-mail, which is all I wanted to do in the first place! By the time I get over to my e-mail, Mr. C has awoken from his nap, and I have to sign off. And I have the bonus gift of feeling kind of icky for my voyeurism.

It had gotten so bad lately that I was actually kind of relieved when our computer crashed. The computer we’re using now is soooo slow, it’s just not worth getting on the internet a lot or for long, so I often only get online once or twice a day, and only for a few minutes. I actually started making myself lists on our whiteboard of things I need to do online: then I sign into our computer and do everything in one fell swoop, instead of getting on every few hours to look up something and therefore getting distracted every few hours.

This is another one of those self-improvement things that seems to be working. I feel better about myself. I’d say I feel more productive, but I’ve easily found other ways to waste my time (damn cake-decorating cookbooks!). At any rate, it’s nice not to feel quite so fettered to my computer.

And, by the way, I know that the easiest way to solve my distraction problem is to remove Yahoo! as my homepage. But then I’d never check up on the celerity gossip; and that just seems un-American.