This year I had the resolution of going back to blogging, and doing so weekly, if possible. Then something happened and I wasn't able to upload pictures. The reasons elude me, and I'm not in the mood either to go and fix anything about it. I did try, but in the end it annoyed me more than it was worth it. And yet, somehow, not being able to post pictures takes away my desire to blog. Isn't that strange?
Though I continue to use the internet daily, I'm using less and less social media platforms, and rather move on other paths of the "inter webs", and some people call them. I'm trying to move to longer format content, and written content, though I do enjoy still a good movie or a series. I moved away from YouTube due to their annoying policies on advertising, which allow undiscriminated exposure to blatantly scammy adds, while the options to report them seem to be there only as a decorative feature, or a front to appease the regulators. To fill the void, I've been using podcasts to get my dose of sound, and have been moving out of the video addiction with Netflix and Max. And slowly I move to written content: books and more blogs.
As I rip away from this milieu, I start noticing patterns: content is shorter and shorter, and even the longer content is peppered with more and more annoying adds, cutting up the content into the small little chunks some algorithm is using to ensure people's attention and memory retention gets halved and halved again, turning people's minds into Achilles' race against the turtle.
Once my head was out of social media, I did notice I was not the only one scrolling and scrolling, annoyed at content labeled "for you", but that had nothing of what I wanted to see. I'm awfully impatient and I won't scroll for 20 minutes to find one post from someone I know and follow, so it was much easier for me to get off IG, for instance. But many are trapped in there, mouses in a spinning wheel, spending hours and hours getting distracted, scrolling and looking for friends while consuming the content spoon fed to them, deemed "for you", and not questioning the why.
Easily bored people then click and buy a myriad of entirely useless things because "they are cheap" and "they seemed so nice/ingenious", feeling the thrill of receiving a package at their door, like a present, when they were the ones paying for it, only to enjoy opening the box, admiring the article and then condemning it to a corner at their homes, where things pile up, soon forgotten, as the very algorithm is teaching them to do.
Many are falling into this grinder, giving up mind and reason for feeble entertainment. I wonder how many are able to escape the clutches of social media.
