Why You Need a Break From the Internet

The chameleon effect

I bet I’m not the only one. I get drawn from one article to another on Medium, following link to link, increasingly unable to resist finding out the secrets promised by the alluring titles: How I Realized My Great-Aunt Was Hiding Something and Why Your Boss Secretly Thinks You’re a Lava-Lamp. Then I sit down to write and I find that my brain is just regurgitating formulas, like one of those ‘bot-written’ stories. “‘And why that’s a good thing’ is a good subtitle,” I think, “We’ll figure out the title later.”

I don’t need a science degree to tell you that imitation is a big part of how people learn and adapt socially. We adjust to the tone of the people we’re with: we remember that it’s ok to swear with our friends but not at work, and we might even find ourselves slipping into other people’s speech patterns or accidentally mimicking their accents (I remember the embarrassment of repeating a London waitress’s accent and ordering a hɑːf-paɪnt instead of my native hæf-paɪnt). We read P.G. Wodehouse and have to resist the urge to greet people with a cheery ‘what ho’, watch 90s sitcoms and find ourselves responding to pleasantries with snarky comebacks. The chameleon effect describes this unintentional mimicry on the basis of a perceptive-behavioral link: if we perceive something, we are more likely to do it.

When I start learning a foreignlanguage, I’ll often put films and radio streams on in the background, and after a while I find that the chatter in the back of my mind is ‘in the new language’, prisencolinensinainciusol-style. I like to think that I’m becoming familiar with the rhythms and sounds and patterns of the language in this way. A neurologist or linguist could probably tell me if my brain is remembering sequences it has heard or is rearranging the puzzle pieces in new ways: what I know is that this feels very similar to the way my brain gurgles out patterns after spending a long time on the Internet.

This is helpful up to a point. It’s good to learn the stylistic conventions of the medium you’re working with. But we learn this really quickly, and unlike learning a language, writing isn’t primarily about mastering a set of patterns that will serve as a tool, but expressing self-generated content in an original voice.

Fruit machines

Michael B. Crawford’s The World Outside Your Head compares gambling addiction to the behavior of a toddler playing with an electronic toy with lots of buttons. Applied physics is frustrating when you’re a child: the world and even your own body react unpredictably, against your will, but when you press the big red button that beeps, it beeps just the same every time: the predictability is comforting and you’re in control. Likewise, the lulling consistency of gambling machines is part of the terrible force that keeps addicts glued to one spot in casinos day and night.

Is the mindless scrolling we can fall into a variant of this phenomenon? When I scroll through Medium articles, I’m taking in some content, but also a lot of format. I know more or less what I’m going to get and how I’m going to get it. Provocative title. Open with dialogue and a self-effacing personal anecdote. Beat. Science. Formulaic advice but dressed up all slinky. You know the drill…

But then when I turn around to write an article of my own, I find that I’m creatively impaired: my brain is trying to reproduce the formula, not create its own thing. Electronic toys that go ‘beep’ are all well and good in their place, but if a toddler only spends his time pushing a big red button, he won’t learn to put on socks or write his name. Friction creates heat. Challenge causes growth, and creativity always requires some kind of growth — some kind of organic movement.

Conclusion

Your brain is going to mimic what it is exposed to. What you perceive is somehow going to be expressed in what you do. There are plenty of reasons for anyone to take frequent breaks from the Internet, which can be as toxic as it is useful, and plenty of reasons for all of us to seriously consider the implications of the fact that we imitate what we are exposed to (short-term it might just mean slipping into an accent; long-term this can forge who we are).

But I particularly want to highlight the implications for creative work and especially writing. If you read a book for an hour, you might well encounter the same level of quality and content that you would find in an hour of scrolling through articles online, but you would certainly encounter a different format, which means that you are the one responsible for putting on your own socks, learning and experiencing instead of enjoying the rhythm for the rhythm’s sake, bridging the gap between different mediums. This allows you to stop regurgitating patterns and instead use the skills you gain through imitation as a tool to express original thought.

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This post was previously published on Change Becomes You.

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