Maturity or age?

In the past, when approaching the holiday season, I have pulled together a list of Web sites that people can surf during quiet times in the office, or even, if they`re that way inclined, while they are on leave.

This has always been a fairly easy list to compile. Over the preceding months, every time someone sent me an e-mailed link, enthusing, "you have to check this out!" I`d take a look (if it`s from a trusted source), then file it away in a folder marked "interesting" for future use in such columns as this.

This month, when I rolled up my shirtsleeves with the intention of doing this year`s column, I discovered that there had been no new entries since the last compilation.

Not less, none. I was very surprised. I tried to think back on the last couple of months to see if I could identify some sort of trend, and I realised that lately I haven`t actually spent any time trying to bat penguins, construct speeches by George Bush, solve puzzles, or soar from the infinitely distant reaches of the universe to the most minuscule molecule of a plant.

These things were the joy of the Internet, and now it seems that they have evaporated from my life.

A couple of weeks ago, I published another column on people`s propensity to shop online, and how this can be measured against the number of years they`ve actually spent online. The number of years dictates the likelihood of them doing surfing, Internet banking and finally, shopping.

I realised that lately I haven`t actually spent any time trying to bat penguins, construct speeches by George Bush, solve puzzles, or soar from the infinitely distant reaches of the universe to the most minuscule molecule of a plant.

Georgina Guedes, Editor, ITWeb Brainstorm

My experience of reduced links being sent to me has led me to develop my own yardstick - a measurement of the propensity of people to fool around on e-mail as relates to the number of years they have had an e-mail address. I have obviously entered the "uses e-mail almost entirely for work-related functions" stage of my evolution. This occurred, in my case, after eight years with access to e-mail.

The first year was spent with a hotmail address that I could only access from my boss`s machine when he was out of the office, connectivity not being the lifeblood of an organisation then, as it is now.

I used this to mail other friends at the forefront of the technical revolution, and was always delighted when, a couple of short days later, I received some sort of a social response.

My second year with e-mail saw me having my own address, connected to a working network that dialled up through my boss`s computer every half an hour. The response time of my friends was lowered to a couple of hours, and we started to enjoy the occasional e-mail chat instead of phoning each other.

My emergence onto the e-mail social circuit happened at my third job, where a leased line meant that access was continuous and immediate, and the world of recreational surfing was opened up to me. This was also the year I received my first reprimand about downloading files from peer-to-peer networks.

The next year saw the discovery of mailing lists, and the ability to reach out and speak to strangers about arbitrary nonsense.

At some point, the realisation dawned that however fascinating it might be to discuss nonsense with anonymous people, the demands that this made on my time were not conducive to a stress-free working environment.

The next three years saw an increase in work mails in my inbox being directly proportional to the decrease in jokes and general nonsense (introducing the proliferation of spam into this equation is too complicated a graph for me to visualise, so I`m leaving that well alone).

The culmination of all of this is today`s column, which was supposed to be a list of fun and interesting sites to access, but is instead a representation of the fact that I have become a dreary, old, work-focused journalist who limits her e-mail socialising and downloading to her home PC, which is probably as things should be.

It is with misty eyes that I watch my friends, who insisted on studying for years and years, and who are only coming into the workplace now, revelling in the first-time joys of unlimited access.

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To each her own