Getting Lost in the Internet Jungle

The internet is a dangerous place. Some parts of it are more dangerous than others. The most dangerous of those, we know to avoid. We avoid them because we've been warned against them, or because we can feel, in our hearts, the danger of those places. Other parts of the internet are dangerous in different ways, and could be said to be dangerous in the same way that the internet itself is dangerous. Those parts of the internet, and the internet itself, are double-edge swords, capable of both good and bad. And sometimes, the bad parts are unseen or counted as being less bad than they are because of the parts that are good. The internet is a jungle.

Jungles aren't bad places. They aren't evil. But they are extremely dangerous. There are many natural hazards and predatory creatures in the jungle. One could easily lose their lives to the many dangers of the jungle, but there's one danger that's less obviously lethal, but still very deadly: the risk of getting lost. Even if the jaguars can't find you and the quicksand can't trick you, you still may never get out of the jungle alive if you lose your way. And even if you do escape the trap of being lost in the jungle, you'll find that you spent a good deal more time in the jungle than you expected to.

People don't get lost in the internet. You can get to any place in the web from any other place in the web by copying down the URL to the place where you want to go. All you have to do is save a link or make a bookmark. If you find yourself in a place on the internet you've never been before, and you've forgotten how you got there, you can check your browser's history. You can also follow the browser's history like a trail of breadcrumbs by clicking the Back button, or teleport back to any website you've ever been to using the links in the history, or, again, copying the URLs. No, people usually don't have much trouble navigating the internet. The real challenge is to stop navigating it.

People can spend a lot of time on the internet. There are billions, if not trillions of webpages we might find interesting, hours and hours of "must watch" footage on Youtube, and countless amusing images and memes shared on Facebook and on the websites they link to. A person could spend their entire life looking at the memes and Youtube videos of their choice and still not have time to see every online thing that interests them. Even cutting out the evil and equally addicting obviously bad parts of the internet, there's more good stuff online than any human being has time for. And yet, here we are, watching it, sharing it, reading it, even writing it, adding to and enjoying the immeasurable mass of time-consuming information, images, and videos that the internet has to offer. I frequently find myself in the trap of spending too much time online.

So, how do we get out of that trap? How do we cut our way free from the jungle of the internet? Taking a machete to the power cord might do the trick, but for a less dramatic and dangerous approach, try this: Acknowledge that there is too much internet for anyone to be able to see it all, and resign yourself to the fact that you're going to miss some of it. It's a fact you'll have to deal with, whether you want to or not, and once you accept it, you can let that fact help you. Acknowledging that there are some parts of the internet that you're going to have to live without can help you be more selective in the parts of the internet you choose to enjoy. Pick out only the most worth-while sites, and you'll eventually learn that you can live without the rest. I have a weakness for Top Ten lists on youtube videos, but they seldom enrich my life, while I can think of several real-life activities that do. By choosing the "better" things over the "good," we will find that the "good" things weren't really all that good in the first place, compared to the things that are better.

The internet is a place where countless good things come together, along with many not-so-good things, and even a few great things. The trick is to be willing to choose to live without the many "good" things on the internet (while avoiding the bad things like the plague), so we have more time to spend with the better things, the things of lasting value, that do some real good in the world.