The internet is not dead, we just choose to walk through graveyards.

I have greatly reduced my internet consumption. This process has taken many years but even just recently I guess I hit peak ‘junk internet’… well not quite peak, but peak for me. See I was writing at the time and sharing my content on Facebook and Twitter, this meant I was frequently get sucked into time vortexes on those platforms. I had recently installed Chromecast on my TV and wound up spending hours watching YouTube videos. In summation, on the go, at rest I was never far from the internet and I would frequently use it.

I knew it was bad for me. I felt empty and ironically much of the content (at least on YouTube) that I was consuming was self-improvement style videos that often espoused the issues with the internet – it hacks your attention, the content isn’t meaningful yada yada. As a consumer I agreed, I understood this was happening to me. I was wasting time on short videos that I wouldn’t remember and across all platforms in fact I saw issues.

YouTube videos felt frenetic and unsatisfying, short videos even worse, liquified content that slipped into often reckless territory. Facebook started to resemble anything but social media feeding me content from pages I don’t follow and giving me notifications that meant nothing to me. Twitter (having jumped back on to promote my work) was well into its new ownership and was a dangerous place that made me angry at the world and sucked out hours of my life. I frequented reddit (still do) checking for updated on the Aleague subreddit multiple times a day, looking for shreds football gossip. Of course all of this was fun (kind of), but over time I grew more aware of the internet’s impact on me.

So the behavioural changes… well after spending years churning out content myself – utterly reliant on these aggregators for views – I began to see a significant deterioration in traffic on my sites. This helped me realise the stranglehold these sites have on the internet and the impossibility of starting businesses and brands as I did just a decade ago. So, when I started my latest project I elected to go physical. In internet terms my fanzine with its 8 or so articles would register 8 views from each person who read it, and over the course of it year of print the 700 or so copies I distributed probably racked up close to 10,000 internet equivalent hits – this is in line with the website itself, which got most of its traffic from twitter, except with a few differences.

Firstly, especially through the lens of understanding my own habits, I realised that many (almost a half) of the website views the homepage, this is either the same people refreshing to see new content or non-human internet scrappers from countries as far as Poland, Romania or Malaysia. Second, the few fans who actually do want to read articles rarely read them properly – I know this from my own experience, event content I love, I will click a link, read the headline and skim the content – it’s partly due to the nature of reading on a screen – or worse a technology you have been trained to scroll through quickly.

I trust that people who got a physical copy of my work actually read at least some of it, without distractions, and at best, re-read it or shared it with others. Over the course of a year this really solidified my views on physical media, or to be broader ‘conscious’ media.

Simultaneously I embarked on two experiments – one, I banned myself from non-fiction reading (mostly self-help) and two, I banned myself from creating any content. In narrowing my reading to mostly fiction I not only came to enjoy reading more but realised that much our the pop-science literature (think airport books) tap into the same desires that aggregators use to keep us on their sites, the longing for more, the desire to be better (self-improvement), know more (pop-science) and have more (personal finance). I started reading mostly fiction and saw that I would imagine more, dream more and learn more from characters I didn’t have to like, who encountered impossible situations beyond what could be presented in much of the non-fiction content I once read. This first experiment helped me change my relationship with desire. As well as other things going on, changing what I read changed what I wanted or at least helped me question what I wanted, made me question my actions and generally helped me feel more calm and at peace.

The second experiment – the content ban, was mostly as a way to help me focus. I was spending too much time writing on  my project and it was distracting me from work, my family and friends. I am the kind of person who wants to complete these projects to a particular standard, so even though my tank was empty in September, I kept going until November, draining my mental capacity and depriving me of the space to really think about what’s important. The content ban gave me space to think, pause and wasn’t just related to the one project, but rather helped me work through the many ideas I had and help decide what’s important. Now having come to the end of that period, I feel creatively refreshed and ready to go – although ironically I probably will write a lot less now that I have experienced and can appreciate the space and peace of rest. I want my projects to be considered and well cared for, and I don’t want to rush into anything knowing that I will give my all to it.

On reflection of the above points I guess I’ve been on a bit of a journey, more-so that I realised when I started writing this piece. But the above helped me realise a simple thing, the internet isn’t dead. Conscious consumption is the antidote to many of its problems and can help up re-live the internet of old I suppose, however it is different overall and it flies in the face of the modern realities.

So I have learnt that:

1. Aggregators feed us content in a way we are not conscious. This impacts our emotional, mental and physical state as well as sucking out our time.
2. Much of our internet consumption isn’t high quality due to the nature of the platform so physical mediums offer a better more fulfilling experience
3. We should question why we are engaging content, what desires are being triggered and is this what we actually want to stimulate?
4. Content consumption can change not just our mindset but what our mind focuses on and how our mind works!
5. We need to be considerate with our energies not just in what we consume but what we produce. Both of these have flow on effects to the wider world.

Overall I guess the above are all lessons in consciousness and mindfulness. There is value in pause and doing the right thing at the right time.

This has also helped shape a couple ideas I have about the internet. For many years now my primary experience of the internet has been through aggregators like facebook, twitter, reddit and youtube, but my most fulfilling experiences have been on websites that lack the algorithmic powered attention traps. These are blogs like TV Tonight, South of the Border etc. I have also realised that longer form content is more fulfilling than shorter form content (including forums) which similar to aggregators hack into our attention through infrequent and random dopamine spikes.

So what am I going to do? Well, I am going to be more conscious of my internet experiences by engaging through these kinds of places first. It takes a little more effort to find and access these websites but I feel more calm when I do, and less tempted to get distracted. So I have bookmarked a couple of websites and will keep an eye on them when I want to kill five minutes, because unlike aggregators, I usually only spend five minutes on them!