I can't deal with the choice it offers like a recovering drug addict, I need to be compelled to leave it alone

TWENTY YEARS ago I trained to be an economics lecturer, which was a career decision that was up there with coal mining or shipbuilding: there were no jobs for economics teachers, because – and spot the irony here – there was a drop in demand for it.

Instead of economics, which was perceived to be quite difficult, students were taking business studies which, at the time was being sold as a more practical, more vocational option. It was also, whisper it, easier.

This is one of the flip sides of broadening choice in education: given the option, most kids choose the path of least resistance. Compulsion is very old skool.

Since then, I’ve never been completely sold on the benefits of choice, which I recognise is a modern heresy. How can you be against choice without coming across like Stalin? Who wants less of something, when they could have more? Which sane person wants their options narrowed?

Well, actually quite a few of us. I thought of my teaching days the other day, when I subscribed to a service called Freedom. This blocks my access to the internet for a period decided by me, and the only way I can restore it is by shutting my computer down and re-booting. All you do is tap in the requisite time, two hours say, and it cuts you off, no Wi-Fi, no ethernet, nada.

The price of Freedom is $10 (€8.30) after a free trial – a small price to pay as it solves a problem that I’ve got with the internet, which is that I can’t handle it. I can’t deal with the choice it offers, to the extent that, like a recovering drug addict, I need to be compelled to leave it alone.

The news used to be an easy enough thing to keep on top of; I’d read the paper on the way to work and feel that I was pretty much on top of events at home and abroad. I was ill informed but happy. These days I devote large chunks of my day to keeping up with the news, and it’s making me poor and miserable.

My e-mail account has well over 200 RSS feeds flowing in from websites around the world. These range from the general – BBC, New York Times, The Irish Timesetc – to the absurdly specific.

Then, once this “formal” news is dealt with there’s Twitter, which is a heat-seeking device for what’s happening now. When a story breaks, I nip on and very quickly get a sense of who thinks what. More significantly, Twitter and other social media let me know how people are feeling towards a topic or story. “When I want information I use Google,” said one tech venture capitalist I spoke to recently. “When I’m searching sentiment, I use Twitter”.

All this is without mention of good old e-mail, which suddenly feels like something from 1975.

There are two downsides to all this searching. The first and most obvious is time, getting stuff done: how do I get the best of the Real Time Web without having two burly men knock on my door and take away my telly?

The second point is, if anything, more troubling. I’ve become obsessed with the road not travelled. The options I didn’t take. The products I haven’t bought. The life I haven’t lived. If I was still teaching economics I’d call this an opportunity cost issue.

In his brilliant essay – The Tyranny of Choice – Prof Barry Schwartz describes what he sees in his own students: paralysed by the vast array of options available to them in every walk of life. Universities, he says, have become like shopping malls, offering a huge array of study options, which allow students to defer the question, “what will I be when I grow up?” Rather than broadening minds, the result is “a generation of students who use university counselling services and antidepressants in record numbers, and who provide places like Starbucks with the most highly educated minimum-wage work force in the world”.

Web 2.0 has revolutionised the way we live and brought enormous advances. So, what will Web 3.0 offer?

Perhaps the future is not more, but less. The most useful new products on the market today, the ones that catch my attention the most, are those that limit my choice, that act to take things away from me. They are filters, barriers to the web, protecting me from myself.

A cartoon in the New Yorker has a parent goldfish talking to his son inside a small goldfish bowl. “You can be anything you want to be – no limits,” says the dad.

We’ve taken away the bowl, and now that question is beginning to feel like a threat.

innovation@irishtimes.com