Why are you reading this?
Have you ever wondered if feed addiction is a real thing?
How did you come to this article? Have you searched for something specific? For what? Nothing you could ever search for will ever bring you here.
Someone has given you this article to read or maybe you were scrolling through articles on Medium and you stopped at this one. What makes this article a good choice to read?
I think there are two things that describe an article. One is the importance of the article and the other is how good it answers our questions.
We are constantly reading feeds every day. Facebook feed, Twitter feed, Medium feed, New York Times news feed, Flipboard feed and many others. Scrolling through these “news” we open everything that looks important. At the end of the day, we think that we are informed, we read everything that is important and our knowledge has grown. But was it what we were looking for?
Because of these feeds people forget what they need and this is what these feeds are looking for. They tend to show you apparently important news, from any domain, news that find inside you the curiosity to open them. And they never stop.
Why do we need suggestions? If we know what we are looking for why do they show us suggestions? We are in control, we don’t need something else and we don’t need something related to anything.
Do you know why they are doing this?
Do you know how they make money? They make money because your grown curiosity opens the promoted “news”, the ads. And ads are money. How much? Thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions and even billions of dollars every year!
If you were trained to look only for what you’d need you probably never open an ad, but you exercise to open consuming promotions.
Even if the name “feed” is about giving something useful, for survival, nowadays it has changed into something else. It’s consumerism and this means receiving more than you need, much more than you can process and understand.
