Nourishing my screen on time

While I was scrolling on a typical day, I made a reflection and analysis on my screen on time: it was mostly memes, random facts and segregated learning through the same feed that provided the memes. It felt as some kind of senseless void.

Looking back to when I felt a connection with the internet as a mystical, infinite space, the differences came apparent. I no longer had a bookmark list, nor cool sites to visit and explore, nor known authors, nor reading through the comment section of a post without it being extremely toxic, full of unchecked and mostly incorrect arguments, violent, and plain disgusting.

What brought me here? Would I be able to go back to feeling the internet as a magical place?

The smartphone as a big factor.

“Smartphones”, glass sandwich internet provided handheld touch interfaced pocketable devices, often really powerful, cover a lot, if not infinite, use case and applications (not ‘apps’).

However, what is the most common use case we, as a society immersed by smartphones, quickly associate them to? I think it has to do with social media, media consumption and generation, doom scrolling and photography taking.

And why is that? How, or why, did we narrowed so much the things we can do with a pocket-sized computer? My theory is that this was a gradual process mandated by the biggest, most trending social media platforms with the only objective of growing their user base.

It makes sense to associate the exponential growth of social media with the smartphone development over the years. What a smartphone provides (instant access to the internet) comes hand in hand with what social media wants to provide: an online presence. Previously this presence was well established, but lacked the instantaneous factor. You couldn’t tell your audience what were you thinking when riding the bus, or showing them how a car is burning down the road now, or what you’re eating at that precise moment.

With the smartphone, content could be shared immediately reflecting one’s own current presence in the world. It was wild and people loved it, it was the new internet boom. Features such as “stories” started to appear, going a step further into the instant instant (double instant intended) sharing.

This is not bad, it’s actually super cool, but it has a flaw: it depends on just a couple (we can count them with our hands) of platforms joining all these posts in one place, facilitating the nature of social media content: to be shared across a network of people.

Imagine if you’d have to enter each of your own friends’ website to see what they’re eating now (do you even want to know that is a different story).

I cannot identify when or where, and it might’ve been so gradual no one noticed, but we started seeing non “social media” posts on social media platforms. Why did we accepted that?

Platforms grew where creating new tools for producing an online presence was the norm for making their user base bigger. We started hearing the “creator” term and started to see how these “creator tools” were growing as well. Social media content started to be broader, where not only an online presence was developed socially as we perceived it previously (sharing stuff with friends or a network), but also professionally, academically, and content producing oriented. And over time social media platforms became the quickest, most common, and in some cases the only known way to interact with the internet.

Back in my times…

Remember when you visited one specific website for one thematic? Today, that might be reduced to an account on Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube (or all of them, which is weird because the same content is spreaded onto different formats which might not follow the content’s essence). This produces content that tries to follow the status quo of that particular platform, following such and such rules to avoid being shadow banned or even deleted.

That happened also with blogs, were they are mostly under the same platform, all looking exactly the same. Why would an author choose its content to have the exact same format as every other one, how can you even differentiate them? Why there are now content creators writing completely entire articles on a Twitter thread? Have I gone insane?

I was missing the original theme of the internet and personal websites: the independence of propagating one’s own content however one liked. By not following this, it does not only take the internet’s independence (and free of speech, to a long extent) away, but it also creates the perfect environment for inducing oligopoly for the internet giants, which own the majority of the content we consume. We’re giving away our rights and liberty to shape and consume the content however we like, and there’s no benefit in this.

I cannot, after trying many times, break the link between a smartphone and (the new) social media, and I feel this goes beyond me, and it also applies for “content creators”.

Now, what is this content about? As I went through the previous paragraph, social media content is not only social content, but is still being aggregated under one format. It feels like a difference is being made between “computer stuff” and “smartphone stuff” where the essence of the content is purer in the first one and softened on the second one.

It might be because of how the “computer stuff” looks on smaller screens and how it feels to interact with them (being it: blogs, writing more than one paragraph, styling text, reading stuff, watching horizontal videos) versus how it feels to view memes, social media posts, and vertical videos. It feels more native, which makes sense, as all these activities are being pushed more and more into the smartphone world and out of the computer world.

It feels like internet quality (if not societal content/knowledge consumption) is being degraded: content tends to be shorter, lacking specificality, uniqueness. Algorithm based consumption started to be the norm, and creators following it blindly (what is this algorithm really?) ended up killing the uniqueness of each persona on the internet.

But what about stuff not being pushed out of the computer world? Aside from article reading and writing, I can go as far as mentioning programming, with an in-between activity such as studying. Would yo do that on your smartphone, comfortably? I, for instance, would not.

How did I break the spell

Moving away from “smartphone content” was a very enjoyable and exploring process for me. I used the help of r/nosurf, the Galaxy Z Fold 4 and a lot of Google. My plan was to collect a list of websites that shared content I enjoyed. It was not hard to do, I know what content I like. I searched for this stuff on Google, but not before adding the “-reddit”, “-instagram”, “-youtube” (and so on) keyphrases to exclude this sites from the results.

After that, it was just following links. Most authors have a blogroll (and thinking about it, I should probably post mine).

The Galaxy Z Fold allowed me to do this without a computer, but also without a smartphone (even though it is a smartphone, the aspect ratio changes a lot on how I perceive this device, where I did not install any social media apps, nor have it as my primary device).

This process allowed me to nourish my internet consumption and screen time, re-exploring personal websites of people that think, do, and write really cool things, with a level of detail not seen on social media. I’ve gone back to populating my bookmark list (remember that?). I’ve been learning so much, about stuff. I’m feeling again the magic of the internet. I come across sites and think “ha! This is funny looking”, and I feel invited to keep exploring that page. I’m reading more. I’m writing more.

Have I become a boomer?

Maybe. Maybe sometimes. I still enjoy memes, doom scrolling, and shitpost, but reducing the internet to that seems obscure for me. And with the addition of AI generated content, we might want to think twice if we want content curated by computers, or by us.