BENGALURU: It was just another night. I was watching random videos when I got a message from YouTube – You’ve watched videos for 23 hours in the last week. Do you want to take a break?’ It was a soul-stirring moment – like when Neo is contacted by Morpheus in The Matrix. The message sent me on a journey through time – back into the dark abyss of time. For this was certainly not the first time I was dealing with a problem of this nature.
My earliest exposure to the Internet was at a ramshackle Internet Cafe in Bhubaneswar. The cafe was a weird melting pot – teenagers with raging hormones, students looking up exam results, and middle-aged men who had just discovered the joys of internet pornography. Amidst this eclectic crowd, I had found my own corner in the World Wide Web – online chat rooms. I had never had a pen friend, and was fascinated by the idea of being able to speak to someone in a different continent.
The first time someone pinged me with the term ASL (Age/Sex/Location), I thought they were abusing me with a common English swear-word! After crashing a number of internet chat rooms, I made my first internet pen friend – Lenecia18.
The cafe charged 40 rupees an hour, and I blew my savings, or money that was nicked from home. Me and Lenecia spoke about our own worlds. She expressed how heartbroken she was that Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman had divorced. I described how Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham was the greatest film ever made. Our love story was interrupted abruptly when a relative saw in the cafe. Upon enquiry, he found that I was a regular customer. I was interrogated, quarantined and thrashed at home.
A few years later, Facebook entered my life as I enrolled myself for a Masters degree. Facebook allowed me to share my blogs, and I got thousands of readers from across the world. It gave me recognition, and the confidence to pursue writing as a profession.
But what began as a boon slowly became a bane. I got involved in Facebook debates, some of them stretched for hours, with threads that had hundreds of comments. In a few days, it began to affect my psyche. Finally, I took an hour and carefully unfollowed each and every person on my list.
My mind was free for a few days, and then the Youtube addiction began. The message from YouTube shook me, and I searched YouTube for ways to block YouTube. I installed an extension on my browser and completely banned YouTube from my computer. With much struggle, I think I have been able to fairly get over my YouTube addiction. But somebody told me about DailyMotion the other day, and I am curious...
The author is a writer and comedian