Everything seems too similar and there are hardly any fresh experiences. No more discovery and random connection with strangers (which is not the same as talking to a bot). Everything is repeated in an infinite loop by the grace of crazy algorithms that pressure us to adopt identical formats—first selfies, now reels, Then we’ll see—and let’s talk (if we fight, so much the better) about the same topics. The price of resistance is irrelevance. Don’t you often feel like you’ve spent two hours on the Internet without really knowing what you’ve spent them doing? In 2006, Aza Raskin created the scroll infinite; In 2018 he admitted to being sorry in an interview with the BBC: “It is a very addictive dynamic that prevents the user from processing the information they read.”
We are more alone than ever. where are the friends? Why doesn’t anyone talk to me? In 2010, social networks underpinned social life, opened the door to new friends and reconnected us with others we thought we had lost. It was the golden age of web 2.0. Now Facebook is a wasteland; Instagram, a farm of narcissists, and TikTok shoot content at such a speed that it barely allows human interaction. Video essayist Eleanor Stern (100,000 followers on TikTok) believes that the problem is that social networks are much more hierarchical now: on the one hand, there is the audience; on the other, the creators. And they are two worlds that do not mix.
We also don’t trust Google’s answers. You should not trust the first page of Google too much. What is well positioned is not usually clean wheat. If today you ask Google how to remove a wine stain from the carpet, thanks to SEO, the search engine will spit out vague answers that do not necessarily come from a personal experience but from content optimization rules, they will probably be copies of other posts. which you will also find in those first entries. There are no longer useful answers if someone hasn’t monetized them. And if you have monetized them, they probably want to sell you an anti-stain product. Start trusting from the third page or, better yet, ask your mother, a friend or take the carpet to the dye.
There is a lot of pressure (we have become too serious). Every time you have to think and work more before publishing. It is the death of nonsense and spontaneity that have made us laugh so much on the internet. “Instagram began the era of self-marketing on-line with selfies, but then TikTok and Twitch accelerated it. Today, selfies are no longer enough, platforms want videos of your life: your body, your words, your hobbies, and if everything is in real time, much better. “We are forced to emulate the role of influencer,” he writes in The New Yorker journalist Kyle Chayka, also author of the book Wishing Less (Gatopardo). But the standards are too high and there is too much competition. Faced with so much pressure, a good part of the audience has withdrawn, does not risk publishing and prefers to adopt a passive role. Ergo, they publish the same ones and always the same thing.
It begins to be difficult to distinguish the lie from the truth. The proliferation of cheap content generated by artificial intelligence has just left us doubtful. The deepfakes They have made us believe that things have been said that were never said and the images are generated by AI: to think that Donald Trump had been arrested in front of the Capitol in Washington. Every time you have to sharpen your sight and hearing more.
Everything is endogamous and self-referential. It is unlikely that we will discover a new website, an original newsletter or an interesting author if we let ourselves be carried away by the algorithm and do not regain control and decide to only go to the places that really interest us on the Internet. One of the great values of the first generation of blogs was that they linked to other universes and opened unknown doors. Nobody insisted that the user be left splashing in the same sauce. But it’s a thing of the past. The big technology companies have no interest in taking you to a site other than theirs, they will link to their own content, and they will have you wandering around like a zombie within their four walls. The most recent example was given by Elon Musk on X (former Twitter) by hiding links and headlines from the media.
Good things are starting to be scarce and expensive (or at least paid for). Two signs are beginning to be unequivocal to distinguish the wheat from the chaff on the Internet: subscription and scarcity. Any serious prescriber, well aware of its value, no longer gives away his assets or negotiates it for visibility, instead he creates a newsletter, charge for the content and wait for them to pick it up. It is silent luxury. Entering the Internet today also means literally crashing into the paywall of the big publications, which only open up in the face of wars and catastrophes. The world will be divided between those who decide (and pay) and those who let themselves be carried away (for free) by the algorithm.
They’ve turned us into content machines (and come on, who wants to be that?). It doesn’t matter what you do: poetry, movies, cooking recipes, photos of your cats, selfies, memes or insubstantial comments, it’s all content. And what is content? According to Kate Eichhorn, a new media historian and professor at The New School, it is “digital material created for the sole purpose of circulation.” In his recent book Content (MIT Press, 2022), Eichhorn points out that the content is bland by design because it has to be that way to travel light in digital spaces. “Its mission is to integrate a single and indistinguishable flow.” Intellect, time and vanity diluted in an insipid stream of digital material destined to circulate until it is exhausted. And we still wonder why we get bored on the internet.
#internet #boring #place