It never fails. I’ll be surfing the Internet, minding my own business, when a brightly colored hyperlink attracts my attention. Immersed in whatever article, blog post, or video I’m currently focused on, I’ll casually right-click the link and select “Open link in new tab”. I’ll read it when I’m done with this one, I think. Two or three inches later down the page, another link catches my eye. Again, I open the provoking content in a different tab. Then again. Then again. Before I know it, I’ve got eighteen tabs open, my laptop is running slower than a snail on promethazine, and I’ve got messages popping up basically screaming at me to lighten the load.
I call it the pizza effect – if you eat one slice of pizza, you’ll be fine (briefly disregarding general health standards for a moment); if you eat eighteen, you’ll be sluggish at best and violently ill at worst. One slice satisfies your need for sustenance. A whole box is just greedy and your system can’t effectively handle it. It’s the same with computers.
Why does that happen? Blame it on those greedy websites. The longer you stay on their site, the better chance there is of you clicking on one of those pesky ads, thereby padding their pockets and draining your free time. So they pile on juicy and colorful links designed by nature to keep their audience on the site for as long as possible. Most links within articles or elsewhere on the page link to other articles on the same site, if you hadn’t noticed. One of the biggest offenders I’ve observed so far is a sports site. I probably shouldn’t name names (Yahoo Sports) but if you click on one link, you’ll be very lucky to get off the site within an hour. Once or twice every paragraph or so, there’s a tantalizing sentence with a nice, fat link right in the middle of it, leading to something related and equally or more attention-worthy. All but the most iron-willed readers can’t help but click.
Another big offender is YouTube. It’s great that the hugely popular video website has a video recommendation system but how many times has a casual clicker such as myself found him or herself on the site ‘til the early hours of the morning? It’s no secret that there’s pressure for the company to make money. Whoops! I just did it myself. The difference here is I’m after your mind, not your money.
Once the links are open, it can be the biggest hassle in the world trying to close them. Between slow-running computers and the time it takes to absorb the content, links can stay up on a browser for weeks. It saddens me to say this but I spent the great majority of my last break from school holed up in a room trying to eliminate the dreaded tabs from my lethargic laptop. The problem wasn’t the actual reading – I love to read and the content was engaging. The problem was once I started on a new page, you guessed it – there’d be more attention-grabbing links to click on. So instead of decreasing the amount of tabs open on my computer, some days they would actually increase. Like I said, it took the vast majority of my break to clear my cache.
You might be wondering what all I look at to warrant such extreme tab-opening. My mom certainly did. Well, first there are the sports sites. My university’s football team had a legendary year this past season so there was always something to keep up with there. Then, of course, there’s YouTube. Link factories such as Wikipedia and Time.com could sit dormant on my laptop for weeks. In addition to the links, the articles are just generally long. I also like to keep up with current events so sites such as Yahoo, AOL, and newspapers – both local and national – are frequent destinations. So are the social networks that rule my life at the moment, Facebook and Twitter. Facebook is not so bad but the links people frequently and so nonchalantly post on Twitter could send one into a tab-opening frenzy. Additionally, when I feel the need to be entertained, I visit sites such as People of Walmart, There, I Fixed It, and Urban Dictionary. Sometimes I’ll leave some of those tabs open just because there’s someone I want to show them to. True, I could just post the links on that person’s Facebook page but sometimes you just have to see the look on people’s faces; comments don’t do enough justice. Irrelevant reasoning, I know. But this is the life I live.
I’m sure I’m hardly the only one with this problem. A study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that the average young American spends over seven hours per day on devices with Internet capabilities. Assuming that their definition of “young” includes college students, that’s more time than a lot of us spend in school. I’m the type of person that won’t close a tab until I’ve read every bit of interesting data on it. How many more of these average Americans are like me? These are the people that will grow up to run the world. How many of us will still be bogged down with scores of tabs to read and the ensuing information overload? It’s a scary thought….
I can’t speak for everyone but I can try to help everyone dealing with the same torturous dilemma. I’ve recently discovered a solution that at least temporarily solves the problem. It’s laughable in its simplicity and I can’t believe it has taken me so long to see it: save the links. Not save them by having them up all the time, but by literally saving them in a file. Copy the links into a word processor document, close the tabs, and move on with your life. Come back to the file when you have the time. Do not open all of the links at the same time. Read and delete. It will save you so much time and effort. You computer will thank you by running faster (unless it has a virus) and you won’t have those tabs dangling in the back of your mind. It’s a short-term solution for a long-term problem but it’s the best I’ve got. Any better ideas?
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