Does reading about, listening to, or watching creative artist inspire emerging artist to work and create themselves or does it impede or hold up the latter's efforts? Speaking-writing-for myself, I think I spend waaaaaay to much time on the net reading about films and those who make them. It's like an addiction. Sometimes it inspires me but often I find myself consuming it. I can spend hours reading about the minutae of Herzog's antics while on shoots, or the latest celebrity crack-up, or the struggles of the latest indie filmmaker.

It is similar to when I drink. I can spend hours and hours and hours drinking beer, having one brilliant idea after another until I fall asleep. When I wake up I can't remember my grandmother's name much less the ideas I had so excitetedly wanted to put to paper the night and day before.

I realize the net can be a means of expression-witness the explosion-but do you feel as a creative person or any person who wants to do anything, that the net has-can- become like the TV, the stereo, an 18-pack, golf, shopping, ad nauseum,  a distracting addiction?