I had to smile when I saw this article earlier today about an internet junkie detox centre. You see, once, I would have hotly denied there was such a thing as internet addiction, even while sweating and jonesing about my laptop not booting up. But I'm finding a good deal less addictive about the interwebs thing than I did for the first three or four years I was online, when I ate, lived, breathed and slept internet and definitely had withdrawal symptoms when dragged away from the keyboard to go on holiday or anything else that disrupted my... uh... "life".

Okay, but I never got into gaming. Back in the mid-90s when I got online I was still a cool Café Culture dude who thought that kind of thing was just too geeky. Besides, on the couple of occasions I tried Sonic the Hedgehog on my mate's Sega Mega Drive I was totally crap with a Capital Uncoordinated C. I don't think I ever got beyond Level 2. I never bothered after that - just not cut out to be a gamer.

My first passion was Usenet newsgroups. I can't even remember which groups I was on now, apart from the Anne Rice one, where I discovered the meaning of 'flame war' and 'trolling'. But it was someone I met on that newsgroup who encouraged me to try my hand at building a personal website, and led me by the hand to Geocities (BourbonStreet, of course). The rest thereafter is history.

I'm one of those who remembers the days when Corel Paint Shop Pro was just Jasc Paint Shop and was shareware. When everyone made tasteless but idiosyncratic and experimental personal websites on Geocities and Tripod. When we still thought the internet was for information and personal expression rather than making quick money through marketing scams. When we were proud of being called 'geeks' by the non-internet-using majority, and people online still freely and generously gave you advise and their software for free (I am still grateful to the stranger who emailed me out of the blue to explain to me that the graphic text on my amateurish site would look better if 'aliased' and proceeded to explain exactly how to do that). It was a weird kind of camaraderie, like being a member of an underground club. Yeah, I do get nostalgic for those days. In the same kind of way a driver of a modern car might get nostalgic for a Morris Minor - the internet I experienced then was clunky and limited compared to today's standards, but it had character and individuality.

Actually, I believe its the lack of individuality that's turned me off the internet nowdays. Since the wholesale adoption of the modern Web 2.0 style, design has become standardised and safe. Everything looks like a Wordpress blog. Much of it is indeed based on Wordpress or similar blog/wiki/CMS templates. When simplicity first started coming back into style, it was a refreshing change from the then-prevailing "everything including the kitchen sink" approach, but now every web "design" company is churning out portfolios of identical-looking clones and it's just boring. Boring, unimaginative and uninspiring. Don't get me wrong here - I like Web 2.0's information sharing, user-centered capability as much as anyone else. I just hate the visual uniformity and soulless sterility of Web 2.0 sites. But who knows - maybe one day we will be laughing over text boxes with rounded corners like we do now over animated blood-dribbling dividers.

I've always been a fan of the hand-made, home-made, unique one-off rather than slick mass-production. Maybe that's why I find myself cured of my internet addiction. It's still a wonderful and treasured medium to communicate with dear friends far, far away that I am never likely to meet in fleshspace, and I know I've come to rely on the convenience of having so much (mis)information so easily available, but the internet itself is no longer my life. I quit the addiction about the same time I quit smoking - now there's a coincidence!