As is well known, the internet and I are in the midst of a 12-year love affair (surpassed in duration only by my Care Bear - and, uh, my parents), but I related to this passage from The Observer’s Tim Adams:

Lee Siegel, meanwhile, author of Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob, extends this argument into an entertaining and sustained rant against the imprisoning internet and the rhetoric of “blogfascism”.

“In the pre-internet age…,” he observes, “there came a moment when you turned off the TV or the stereo, or put down the book or magazine… You stopped doing culture and you withdrew — or advanced — into your solitude. You used the phone. You went for a walk. You went to the corner bar for a drink. You made love… You wrote a letter.

“Now, more often than not, you go to the computer and online. There you log on to a social networking site, make an entry on your blog, buy something, try to meet a romantic partner… You might send an email, but no one ever just sends an email. Every online activity leads to another online activity…”

Siegel exaggerates for effect maybe, but any one of us who spends a large part of his or her day – for work and leisure – in front of a screen will recognise at least the contours of that behaviour. Your computer invites habitual usage, from email to bookmarked sites, to Twitter followers, to YouTube favourites, and it is a circular rather than a linear progress; if you plotted your history folder I’m guessing you would discover it was not about narrative, but repetition. This circumnavigation of our familiar haunts may suggest exploration, or at least the possibility of it, but there is a compulsive sameness to the quality of the experience. Some of this has to do with the computer’s illusion of constant novelty (constantly disappointed), some of it has to do with its inbuilt solipsism, its anti-social quality, which can give rise to that mean-spirited tone of generally anonymous debate and comment that the New Yorker writer David Denby has recently dismissed as “snark”.

Some of the language makes me cringe - “blogfascism”? - but it’s true: for an increasing proportion of people, it’s difficult to ever switch the internet and its possibilities off. There’s always new information, new responses, new -it must be acknowledged - possibilities for validation (a Twitter @reply, a Facebook comment, an email, a ‘like’).

Even when I travel, I return to the comforting arms of the internet at least once a day: in the morning or in the evening. My excuse, contrary to the remarks above, is that it’s my time for introspection, a chance to get down all the thoughts and experiences of the day that just passed so I can dedicate myself fully to the next one.

The longest I’ve spent without the internet in the past… decade, I think, was five days in central Australia in September. I lost coverage, but my sleeping patterns changed noticably - all of a sudden, I wantd to go to sleep at 10pm.

That said, as soon as I got my coverage back I was all, “excuse me, I need to have a date with my email,” and chuckling and marvelling over the news of the week that had just passed. And that also said, I don’t think I’d be particularly gifted at the art of solitude even if the internet didn’t exist.

What do you think? How has the internet impacted your capacity for solitude?