Is the Internet Draining Your Soul?

By Rod Anderson, CP Cartoonist Thursday, October 13, 2016

Who doesn't love the Internet? News, entertainment, shopping, connecting with friends? But what is it doing to our souls?

Back in the mid-1990s, Andrew Sullivan, the former editor of the New Republic, learned he was HIV-positive. Twenty years later, a series of health issues, including infections that wouldn't clear up, caused him to shut down his popular and influential blog, "The Dish."

The ironic, or perhaps telling, thing was that his HIV infection had little, if anything, to do with his health troubles. What was making him sick was the Internet.

Sullivan tells this story in the cover story of the Sept. 19 issue of New York Magazine, titled "I Used to Be a Human Being." In it he described his version of what is sometimes called "living in the web."

"For a decade and a half, I'd been a web obsessive, publishing blog posts multiple times a day, seven days a week. ... Each morning began with a full immersion in the stream of internet consciousness and news, jumping from site to site, tweet to tweet, breaking news story to hottest take," Sullivan wrote.