Building a slow web by Greg Sarjeant.
You join a new service and you’re presented with a feed. The name tells you all you need to know. The feed is the actor. You are the thing that is acted upon. You don’t control the feed. Your role is to be fed.
The feed is relentless. It’s even shaped the way we see ourselves. We don’t read books or watch movies or listen to music anymore. We consume content - ingest what we’re fed.
The internet I came to love was quieter. Smaller – which is not to say small. It was still vast, but it was a vast collection of small sites instead of a small collection of vast sites.
But as the sites were replaced by feeds, the learning was replaced by reacting. The joy by fatigue. The wonder by indifference. The communities by hashtags.