I love the internet very much, it has been a huge part of my life really. From teaching me English to helping me find a lot about myself I couldn't have otherwise learned from real life sources, I have found the internet to be very helpful and would feel attacked whenever someone said the internet is doing more harm than good, to an extent these people are correct too. Lately my opinions on the internet has changed drastically, all I've been seeing is a repetitive cycle of content and it has been draining me. I started to notice this when the Spiderverse part 2 was released and barbenheimer became a trend. I could not scroll my way out of this trend, it was absolutely everywhere. Just to test this I made different accounts on youtube, instagram and pinterest. No matter what type of content I consumed I always stumbled upon barbenheimer posts or advertisement for all the barbehheimer tshirts you can buy. After that I decided that I should cut down on social media. I realized just how much we let social media control us, as both content consumers and creators. When my friends started to talk about how good the barbie movie was, I started feel at some point pressured to like the barbie movie but in my most honest opinion, it's just an ad nothing more. Recently, I started to experience an intense fear of missing out, for every trend I am not a part of/haven't heard about, I feel like I'm less significant to my friends who have. I've always been a person of niche, so I was fine with not getting popular culture things but each misunderstood inside joke has led me further down this path. Now I keep checking my reels everyday, to get myself on the same level as my peers, to not miss a joke again rather than for fun or to kill time. This really drained me and I started to feel like the internet for the past couple of years has become an automated system, deprived of individuality and genuine self-expression. There are some bizarre theories on the internet that try to explain this phenomenon, one of them is the "dead internet theory". If you don't know what this is, it's basically a theory that suggests the internet around the years 2016-2017 died. People have been replaced with AI and most of the content is generated by AIs and bots on the internet. Now to some extent, this is theory is true, because social media and news have been on a cycle for a long time now, all posts and news stories they follow a certain formula to get views. I would argue that this formula to clickability has, to some degree, "killed" the internet and now we are in this loophole of content that feels good to our brains. Of course, short form content is trying its absolute best to keep us engaged, from reddit stories with minecraft parkour backgrounds to every single video you see having giant subtitles to keep you reading, we can't really argue that this doesn't work. Good thing someone on youtube predicted that it will not last long. This has finally disturbed me enough to motive me to try and separate myself from social media, starting my own blog and finding ways to cope with this feeling. Some things I do to avoid this feeling is by watching longform content on youtube (mostly video essays) and doing creative things instead of constantly consuming media. One of my favorite practices is to challenge myself to pick up a book whenever I feel like scrolling on social media, this practice has taught me a lot and I managed to channel a significant amount of time into doing something more productive than scrolling. And I feel if that if the internet had truly realized what is going on, we could change for the better and make the internet more individual and expressive as it once used to be. When you look at web design, you can see a significant change in the character in the websites. This is probably because brands are trying to either look as premium and elegant as they can and also to get the biggest audience possible. But that's what makes it so ugly, because it derived it from the personality it once had. Even though sites usually offer customizations they're all limited to profile pictures, theme colors and chat wallpapers or other basics. The thing about older websites was it was all dedicated to a single niche and they were blogs containing people's projects and their passions, it was a genuine expression of personality and character, they contained lots of colors, blog diaries extending pages and pages and lots more. This is the type of internet I miss and it's what I thing it lacks today. How long has it been since you been to a website/app that's not a social media? (vpns and google don't count) Personally I find the answer to this question to be pretty terrifying, the only websites that are not social medias are the websites I visit to find the answer to a particular question or quick searches to find a particular piece of media that's not on social media (to watch a movie or to read something) Has social medias, search engines and streaming services become our only use for internet? What was the internet before, what did it become? Are we going to change anytime soon? These are the questions that boggle my mind and I invite you to think about these for a while too, for the sake of the internet and how it affected us as it became more and more short-form, advertisement based and rapidly changing. I believe that internet should be a place of self-expression free of censorship and not one where people are blinded by their 15 seconds of fame. I will be continuing to use this site as a place to dump my most inner thoughts, individual projects and be at peace with my unpopular likings. I hope more and more people fight the battle of individual creation and self expression against corporations. Don't be afraid to take space.
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