My general web browsing habits are getting to the point where I need to make some serious changes soon. I think my habitual scrolling and decade long youtube addiction has played a part in myself not taking opportunities in life that I would have otherwise.
I have noticed that the only three places where I think about anything at length are in the car, in the shower, and while waiting to fall asleep at night. Screens and digital hyperconnectivity just inhabit too much of everywhere else for me. Over the last few months, I have been up at night for an hour or two just thinking about things, such as the topics for this website. It feels like my mind is so starved for creative outlets. It won't let me sleep because it has been silenced all day by intaking excess information that it has to put in overtime just to try to parse through any ideas from the day's experiences.
I am certainly in an obsessive phase with the ideas of Douglas Rushkoff at the moment. Something that stuck with me in one of his talks is the idea that our media environment tends to discourage extensive thinking and introspection. What happens to ourselves when we spend 45 minutes or an hour thinking about one thing instead of 15-30 seconds. The latter implies that we barely scratch the surface of a topic before we open social media/youtube/video games. I've been thinking about this idea a lot. I very much disagree with the idea that people are getting dumber. However, I think this phenomenon, in which the attention economy constantly disrupts our train of thought, can lead to a culture-wide change where ideas and opinions become less developed and our ability to think critically about subjects deteriorate.
This idea also bleeds into how we interact with each other, especially online. I am thankfully not on twitter and have never been on twitter, but I am finding myself more and more thinking in short "140 character-esque" quips. Twitter and internet comment sections seem to have compacted our communication. The attention economy implores us to take as little time as possible to interact with each other online. I feel that the argumentative nature of comment sections online is, in part, due to this. When we have conversations in person, they are infinitely complex. We have body language, inflections, and immediacy that add up to actually conenct us to each other, even in disagreement. How often do you read a long, well thought-out comment/reply online vs. short and shallow ones? I feel like I see arguments in almost every comment section on reddit/youtube/instagram. Arguments are the norm, not vunerability, not self-expression, not any sort of deep discussion, and very rarely, a sense of community.
Technological wearing down of attention reaches further back than social media of course. One reason Neil Postman opposed television was that it lacked the exposistional quality of print media. This means that the suspension of disbelief you would have to engage in to read a book is not there with TV. You don't have to sit in silence for hours and engage with ideas presented on the page. Information flies by so fast with TV and thus with digital media that its hard to assign anything a deep level of importance.
Sorry, these ramblings are so long. As I have been writing this, I just keep returning to Youtube. They have a grasp on my sanity. I think my current solution going forward is to try to un-"smart" myself as much as possible and thus make myself smart-ish again. I have already shed my smartwatch and moved to more traditional watchs to lower notification obsession. Instead of a phone I'd like to revive my iPod so I can just do music listening as a standalone activity. Instead of typing on WordPad, I'd like to maybe get a typewriter so I can write as a standalone activity (my handwriting is terrible). I'd like to get more analogue music gear so I can continue to make music as a standalone activity. etc, etc.
In conclusion, I really just want to be able interact with the world and people directly without so many factors trying to disrupt that. I'm certainly not anti-technology. I might look into doing some rooting/hacking or whatever to my android to drastically change its functionality so its really only for call/text/and some music apps. There seems to be some trends online where people are pointing in this direction. I just hope it actually leads to some sociatal change.
Thank you neocities community for providing a platform for long-form and interesting internet interactions.
