Things to Do on the Internet That Aren’t Feeds
Uh… so when did this happen?
This is almost hard to communicate because I know those people who are all “what is the world coming to? Everyone’s all addicted to their phones! Am I the only normal one left?” and yadda yadda.
I’m not one of those people, I swear.
Except. Lately I’ve been noticing a concerning trend in myself:
I’ve been getting caught in loops.
Here’s how it goes. I’m done working for the night, I’ve got the browser open and catch up on my Youtube subscriptions. Head over to Twitter, see what’s new — it’s only like 12 new tweets in the stream since the last time I checked. Nothing. Head over to Facebook, write my one movie review of the night maybe. I don’t even really have a Facebook feed to read, there’s only a few sources on there and they’re mostly whatever. I don’t care.
Close those tabs.
“Well, what am I going to do now?” I ask in my head.
Hand idly moves to the URL bar, starts typing T-W-I-T-T
What? I just confirmed I was done with that.
My default loop is just this over and over. It’s stupid and useless.
I’m sure many of you have found the same thing.
THE PART WHEREIN I PLAN MY ESCAPE FROM THE LOOP
Let’s just confirm: this isn’t a fight against social media. I’m not renouncing anything and deleting accounts. But I do want to find a better way to use my more ample time than sitting in that sort of holding pattern.
It’s probably not even that hard.
I left Reddit one day and haven’t thought much at all about going back. It was a similar loop and I found I wasn’t getting anything out of it, so I quit.
This is the same thing. Not difficult in itself, just have to recognize and fill those moments with a new path.
So, we need to decide what the new path will be.
Feedly has been alright. I still lament the death of my old Google RSS feeds, but that’s over and done now, so.
It still amounts to what feels like useless scrolling. It’s only marginally better than a social feed, honestly, even if it is more journalistic than directly human.
Medium too. There’s stuff to read, but it feels like all the other stuff I read.
Ultimately I think the loop should be broken by doing something more drastically different. Physical books, perhaps. I could go back to reading one a week like I was before. I started doing a Sudoku with breakfast like I used to do at lunch at work if I wasn’t out for a walk to stretch.
Started working out sort of, but that’s a story for a whole other article.
I still do a lot of physical design work with Forgelock and prototyping and such, so I feel good about my general work / work balance. I feel good about my work / life balance too. Today I went for an aimless drive and ended up writing an email to an old friend who moved away while watching the sunset on the hood of my car in the middle of nowhere. Awesome.
But the loop is slightly insidious in the subtlety. It’s that micro time between being done and going to bed, say. Maybe it’s only five or ten minutes. Not enough to really do a real thing but more than I’d like to spend doing nothing.
Maybe it’s time to get a library card.
I had a colouring book. Wonder where that ended up…
In the end, I don’t have a solution right now. But I have noticed the problem and that’s the first step to solving it.
It does raise an interesting point about the internet on the whole though.
When I was a kid, before Google was a thing, before Facebook and before Twitter. We had sites like Neopets. Games. Educational, kid-friendly learning sites like Brainpop (holy, it’s still there! Nostalgia) and there wasn’t really a loop at all. You turned on your computer and you went to the site you were intending to go to and you did that until you were bored. Then you left.
There was no checking up on stuff because there was no feed. There was no time element to the internet at all, really. At least not for us. It’s not like I was checking AOL News every day.
We had the Encarta. Like a proto-Wikipedia that was on a disk.
And since then I’ve seen the whole evolution of relationships towards the internet as a medium. This loop, I suspect, is only going to curl tighter and tighter since it’s the most ideal usage pattern for advertisers and monetized platforms. Keep users refreshing the page, keep them scrolling past ads.
It’s sort of weird that I could even really think of another website to go to.
We don’t really directly go to sites anymore.
I was trying to think of the last time I just typed in a site that wasn’t some aggregating feed delivery system.
Researching PHD in Curiosity articles is probably as close as I come. You have to Google stuff and follow it around to all the strange cracks and crevices of online history resources. Some of those articles are even sourced from Google books texts, some of the most obscure things possible.
Podcasts, I guess. I’ll actually type in Nerdist or Idle Thumbs or whatever to get to their listings.
But all in all, not many.
So. That struck me as interesting.
I don’t know what it means yet, but interesting.