Nerve Endings Firing Away

But I’m also interested in the problems that “information couples” run into. I know that I don’t really watch TV any more. I’m online all the time. But whereas a couple watching TV, curled up on a sofa together, may have felt “together”, a couple surfing on two wifi laptops are visiting different sites, having different experiences. They seem more apart than together. The internet age feels less communal than the TV age did.

So how does surfing impact on your relationship? Is one of you more info-addicted than the other? If so, is there a sense that the less-addicted partner is some kind of “information widow” (or widower)? Bereaved by the internet? Does one of you have more to do online than the other? Does the first one to be bored online dictate some offline activities, or does the one who wants to stay online longest make the other one click around aimlessly for hours?

The picture in the above-quoted post might just have been Ash and I doing our own thing (except for the then-girlfriend part). Imomus raises several interesting points on the effect of Internet surfing on couple relationships. At least, in my case Ash is a dedicated bloggers so can relate to my equally-addictive blogging habits but I bet there are bloggers out there whose spouses are not remotely interested in blogging or even the Internet. How do they cope up? Sometimes, we find it difficult to cope up with our online surfing habits although we have almost an equal number of blogs on our feed reader (I have blogs that update more frequently though).

I agree that watching TV is more communal (not the RSS-Muslim League type) than surfing the Internet but in a rapidly changing world, we have to make conscious efforts at doing ‘offline’ things together. Damn! I could be watching TV with Ash right now instead of writing this post.