My Journey Through the Internet
When trying to decide where to begin my digital dérive — my journey through the internet — the first website to come to mind was Reddit. A link aggregation site, Reddit seemed like the perfect place to find a variety of interesting links to outside sources that I could follow for as long as I wanted. I mean, they don’t call it the “front page of the internet” for nothing. Since I already have a Reddit account where I subscribe to different pages that are suited to my interests, I decided to instead start at the “all” page, where anything and everything submitted to Reddit is posted, since I felt that to be more in the spirit of the assignment.
My journey began with a couple of funny and interesting pictures and gifs, including a bear with an interesting reaction in the background of a wedding photo and a picture of a Roomba wielding a knife. Immediately following the series of pictures, I ended up clicking on a link to a political story about suspicious money transfers following a meeting at Trump Tower. This specific instance reminded me of part of the reason that I like Reddit — I can at one second be looking at ridiculous, sometimes nonsensical pictures or gifs, and then another second, I can be reading serious and intriguing articles that make me stop and think.
Now, this particular article I was linked to was located on Buzzfeed News, and the bottom of the article was of course filled with dozens of clickbait, absurd sounding articles just begging for me to click on them. While I’m not usually a huge fan of Buzzfeed, or clickbait garbage, I knew that I had to click on some of them during my voyage through the web. Some of my absolute favorite headlines include: “Which ‘Atypical’ Character Are You Based On The Desserts You Pick?”, “Choose Your Favorite Breakfast Meals And We’ll Reveal Which Animated Disney Hunk Is Your Soulmate”, “Taco Bell Was Voted Best Mexican Restaurant In The Country And People Are Mad”, “Alex Trebek Rocked A Beard On Jeopardy And My Body Was Not Ready”, and my personal favorite, “Which Golden Girl Are You In The Streets And In The Sheets?” (and for the record I am Dorothy in the street, Sophia in the sheets).
One thing that I noticed about all of the articles and quizzes I found on Buzzfeed was that every one of them had several options to share the page/results with friends on social media, as if all of my friends on Facebook and Twitter are just dying to know which TV show character I am based on my food preferences. I was instantly reminded of Evgeny Morozov’s “The Death of the Cyberflâneur”, where he talks about the fading of anonymity on the internet.
After finishing up on Buzzfeed, I decided to go back to Reddit and continue on. After wading through some more links to funny or interesting pictures and gifs, I came across a link to a song on YouTube called “Slow Dancing in the Dark”, which I found that I actually really liked. Following this, I went on a series of clicking on related videos, most of which were other songs and music videos. Something that I really like about just browsing YouTube and the related videos is that I am able to discover a variety of songs that I have never heard of but really enjoy. This brings me to one major point that I realized during my digital dérive: even if you try to simply “surf” the web trying to avoid purposely going to certain websites tailored to your interests, the internet has a way of figuring out your tastes and interests and serving you content that it thinks you would like, and while it sometimes can kind of freak me out a little bit, I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing.
