This article popped a few days ago and cited a recent British study as its core argument. I'm not sure that in and of itself the internet makes anyone feel happier, but I would agree that it has the potential to facilitate a more connected and well rounded experience. It certainly has the ability to make me totally lose track of time on silly websites. Case in point: LOLcats & its misc partner sites.
To combat or at the very least temper this ignorant bliss, it helps to use specific combination of shortcut keys and internet browser extensions (small plug-ins available for most browsers like Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox). When looking to block a set of sites or a group of sites or even the entire internet save for one necessary website like Wikipedia, try using LeechBlock for Firefox or StayFocusd for Google's Chrome browser. Also under the best circumstances, it's hard to focus on the text on the pages because of a variety of factors including a bevvy of visible banner and sidebar advertisements and just finding the text too small to read on a normal size monitor or netbook. For Firefox users, try AdBlock Plus and for Chrome users try AdThwart to block out annoying ads and for when you see the more elusive flash video player ads there is always a version of FlashBlock for both browsers here and here. The catch for both extensions is that YouTube videos will often not play when either the ad or flash blocking extension is enabled but it is fairly easy to add certain sites to a white-list.
The final part of making any page readable involves controlling the contrast of the text and the background as well as the size of any page. Firefox users can try Invert Colors, and Chrome usersInverter. As for size, on Windows machines having a mouse with scroll wheel is nice because it simply involves holding Ctrl and using the scroll wheel to increase size on any web page that is in focus (One may also press the + or - buttons next to the backspace bar in combination with Ctrl.) This works sometimes even for different applications and text editors (Notepad++) and probably works for Macs as well but the Ctrl is replaced with either the apple or function keys.
In the future, hopefully myself or some nice developer will create an extension that incorporates all of the above changes to the user interface and makes it a shortcut key. The only problem is that inverting the colors on my website will have of course the opposite intended effect. With any luck most of the changes will assist anyone in making the internet a little easier to discern the dumb pages from the smart parts of the web.
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