Hello 2014, please bring back curiosity to the web.
A personal story with a professional touch.
The past 5 years, I have been defining the years in taglines. It’s a personal thing, it helps me understand more about my personal growth. Sometimes it takes a while to find the right words, sometimes it’s there before the year is over. 2013 was such a year. Its tagline is:
Searching is the new curiosity.
I urged myself to write a bit about it because I’m not fully content with this theme. Also, I think many of you share my vision on this matter. During 2013 I browsed my way through an infinite amount of blogs and endless social streams to find both answers to both personal and professional questions. Yup, search is inevitable. But I often found myself searching at times where it would have been better to simply sit down, do nothing and give matters some thought. In order to find answers due time. After a while, I realized this continuous urge to search and find answers was affecting my curiousity. And yes, I partly blame the (social) web for it.
The web outsmarts boredom, where it should enable curiosity.
Connected media is the norm, which won’t change and is great in itself. But apart from the question if we can possibly get any shorter than 6 second films like Vine and 10 second existence like Snapchat, I think it’s more important to question why we massively settle for these low-res-filtered-never-ending-loopable content as a respected norm? It’s a remarkably conflicting trend, knowing we experience (mobile) internet connections becoming faster and data storage as no issue anymore.
“The simple rule is that the easier it is to use a medium, the faster it will become noisy, and the noisier it is, the less responsive it is.” Seth Godin
The point I want to make is this; the constrained momentary feeling you get after checking all your (social) streams gives a primitive state of instant gratification and triggers constant distraction. Therefore, we continue to generate too much of too little and things often become way too noisy. As a result of this, the good stuff you want to engage with or get’s you inspired is snowed under and becomes increasingly hard to find, which leads to an infinite state of searching. This makes it harder to be bored or do nothing from time to time. And that exactly is important in order to reach a state of curiosity.
For me this is a powerful insight to be aware of for the year to come. I am looking forward to building things upon this insight and design my own way around the existing web. All in order to steer the web towards a more qualitative direction, and use it more as an enabler of curiosity.
Thanks for reading. I wish you an inventive, lively and an utmost curious 2014. I would — if you enjoyed reading this piece — appreciate if you could scroll down and hit the recommend button!
