The other day, Warren Ellis wrote this paragraph in his e-mail newsletter, Machine Vision*:
I cannot, lately, shake this peculiar sense that the net is quieter than it used to be. Possibly because email is less of a thing? Because I don’t live on Facebook? And social media is technologically privileged over, say, news or RSS?
This is something I’ve been noticing lately, but I haven’t been able to articulate the thought. I follow a lot of blogs, and they’re still publishing. I follow a lot of people on Twitter, and they’re still tweeting. But whenever I spend time online now, I get a sense that the lights are off and nobody’s home. I wonder if it’s because I’m a text-centric person and the internet feels like it’s moving more toward photos and video than text? Or if it’s because there are more people online, but they’re all staying within their carefully defined niches and sharing the same content?
This is a frustrating thing to discuss because it’s entirely anecdotal. I’m sure all the facts and figures indicate that more people than ever are spending time online. But everything feels so small and predictable, now. Maybe now that I’ve been online for over a decade—I was a late bloomer—the sense of novelty is gone? Where the hell has the internet gone?
* If you’re interested, you can sign up for Machine Vision at warrenellis.com.
The ubiquitous becomes invisible, and the cool kids that made a the internet such a compelling place for cyberpunk writers to dream about have all become obsessed with deliberately analog technology (vinyl records, letter press, chicken coops…)
So when you say the internet has gone quiet, what you really mean is that our consumption of it has become more passive (we read more than we comment), ubiquitous (how many time a day to you read or receive content through your phone?) and the conversations have moved off of websites and blogs and into Facebook (when we have things to say that are acceptable to say in front of moms and bosses) and text messages (when we have things to say that aren’t).
The internet blows.
People are cynical and constantly talk about how everything is worse now than it used to be. Anything that’s good is dying out or in decline, to hear most people on the internet tell it. Ideas on how to make things better? I never hear any of that.
The state of political discourse? Worse now than ever before. Popular music? At an all-time low. Crime? It just gets worse and worse, right? (wrong). That bar up the street? Used to be so much better like four years ago before those “new” people came along and messed it up. The internet is apparently totally lame now too, even though I’m not seeing Constant talk about what specifically he’d like to see more of.