you’re addicted to…nothing about to happen.
All big Internet successes — e-mail, AOL chat, Facebook, Gawker, Second Life, YouTube, Daily Kos, World of Warcraft — have a more or less addictive component — they hook you because they are solitary ways to be social: you keep checking in, peeking in, as you would to some noisy party going on downstairs in a house while you’re trying to sleep. – Nicholson Baker, “The Charms of Wikipedia,” New York Review of Books 55, 4 (20 March 2008)
The mediated life seems to consist of waiting for something big about to happen. On cable news, you hear it in the tone of a voice such as Wolf Blizter’s. Everything he says amounts to “and now, the think you’ve been waiting for,” but then the now never arrives. You feel it when you keep asking your computer to get mail from your email account. You feel it every time you log in, reload, reset, reboot.
Has anyone written about this strange emotional quality of media such as cable news or the Internet? It seems essential to a certain kind of paralysis that one feels in our contemporary world. Information overload. Always on the edge, edgy, and then edged out. You’re standing at the precipice of a crossroads, to quote Little Carmine from The Sopranos. But you never arrive.
The link leads nowhere but to the same perpetual cusp.