Whatever the inventors intended us to do with eyelashes, they probably couldn’t have imagined how emotionally attached to our eyelashes we would become. A recent study examining Internet tab usage found that 25 percent of respondents experienced browser crashes several times a week because they had too many tabs open at the same time. You might even be reading this right now on what feels like your millionth tab.
When I sit down at my computer, the first thing I do is open my browser and see all my tabs lined up neatly for me. It feels comforting, like you’re reducing the infinitely vast Internet to a familiar neighborhood. I walk in looking for directions to the Korean restaurant my friend wants to try, and the next thing I know, I’ve clicked on another tab and I’m looking for concert tickets for an early-aughts indie-rock band that’s on tour. again. Sometimes I click on my tabs just to remember what’s there. Ah, of course, you, old friend!
I let my lashes build up until they’re tight little squares and their identifying logos are almost too small to make out. I open a new window only when I want to separate a group of related tabs to stay focused. That’s weird, though: I prefer to work among the chaos of all my tabs, where my method of getting to the madness is to know (mostly) where everything is. I often spend hours on the Internet and don’t close a single tab before turning off my laptop. Closing a tab means celebrating a mission accomplished, or saying goodbye to a desire that I have surpassed or an opportunity that I have let expire.
Some people get stressed by too many eyelashes. They have a valid point: science has proven time and time again that multitasking reduces productivity. It’s distracting to have little flashing reminders of everything else you’d rather look at than the task at hand. However, at this point, the eyelashes feel like an extension of myself. If my computer experiences a surprise reboot, the first thing I do when it restarts is click “Restore All Tabs.” For a split second, I anxiously wonder if they’re gone forever, along with all that time I spent curating my personal Internet and all those valuable, if forgettable, web pages lost in the void of cyberspace. Once they’re gone, I won’t be able to find them again. They are small parts of me (my desires, memories, goals) that I am afraid of forgetting. But they usually recharge and I breathe a sigh of relief.
Maybe part of me longs for the pre-social media days of Web 2.0: the delightfully random StumbleUpon, chat rooms, and the weird and amazing Reddit I used in high school. In my opinion, exploring the Internet through a browser creates a more concrete experience than scrolling through platforms like X or Instagram, where algorithmically tailored content produces paradoxically impersonal results. Of course, that algorithmic infrastructure drives everything about our online experience today. But I appreciate my lashes because they remind me of a simpler time and give me a feeling of control and ownership. They make me feel like there are little pieces of the web that are mine. Would you scroll through a friend’s browser tabs without permission? Probably not: it’s as big a violation of privacy as looking at a friend’s diary. After all, few things are more personal than what we admit only in our search bar.
