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When you wake up in the morning the first thing you do is roll over and check your phone for notifications. This isn’t a thing that some of us do, either. We all do it.
Maybe instead of checking your phone, you’re opening a laptop or turning a tablet on. The point I’m making is that you’re checking something, and that’s what matters.
But why? Why are we going to bed looking at a screen and waking up and repeating the action? Is it to catch up on news? Check for missed emails? See which one of your friends decided it was a good idea to go out on a weeknight and document it on Snapchat?
I can’t answer that question anymore. The only reason I unlock my phone in the morning and scroll through the hellscape that is Twitter and Instagram is because it’s a habit. Same shit, different day. Idiots tweeting at Donald Trump in an echo chamber because they think it’s going to make a difference. People using that joke format where they pick a name like Karen or Janis and then talk about student loan debt just hoping to get 30 or 40 favorites and a couple of retweets.
I honestly think the constant scrolling is worse for me than smoking cigarettes. We’re all addicted and there isn’t a nicotine patch for being #online.
It’s safe to say that we’ve reached a tipping point on the Internet. Nothing is ironic anymore and the shelf life for a funny meme is about ten minutes. In 2017 the name of the game is “shareable content.”
It’s all about clicks and going viral and trying to make as much money as possible. Corporate America spends millions attempting to figure out what exactly makes something go #viral and how to do it, only to be scorned time and time again by stupid, totally random shit like Rebecca Black, that kid named Gavin who makes the funny reaction faces, or a tweet about a sheriff sucking people off.
Anything good or pure that comes out of the internet by a no-name is immediately co-opted by Johnson & Johnson, ESPN, and fucking Arby’s. The Central Intelligence Agency has a Twitter account that (in some people’s worlds) is considered funny.
And if that wasn’t enough, one must also try to tread lightly when posting online for fear of massive Internet backlash. I can’t write a blog about a yoga studio or couples who think they’re better than their single counterparts without getting messages from strangers, friends, or acquaintances completely overreacting. It wasn’t like this in 2008. Twitter was the Wild West.
Tyler, The Creator was tweeting everything in all caps and I had friends copying his format, saying lude, lascivious things about Sarah Palin that you wouldn’t want to repeat out loud in this current climate. It was a world where the Wendy’s Twitter account wasn’t considered woke and The Home Depot wasn’t stealing memes from Instagram accounts.
What are we doing? Seriously. Podcasts are the new blogs. In four or five years, no one is going to be podcasting anymore and the internet, as a collective, will be onto something else.
The goal of this post isn’t to scare and it’s not to say that I don’t enjoy all of the wonderful things that the Internet has to offer. Most of the time the Internet provides me with entertainment that I can’t get anywhere else. I’m grateful for that. But for some reason I woke up this morning and I felt a little burnt out by all of it.
I know this already sounds like an abridged version of Tyler Durden’s diatribe about how “you are not your khakis” but I had to let it out.
Would you even know if this was a #sponsored post, though? Is this just a way for me to get clicks? For me to aggregate more pageviews by using buzzwords and trending topics like Matt Lauer or Tennessee Football? Are we in the Matrix? Is The Internet just a tool created by some higher power to keep us occupied?
Enjoy your day. I hope it’s filled with #sponsored posts from lots of corporations and hilarious viral rants from Jimmy Kimmel and Rachel Maddow. .
Respond
jduda@grandex.co
I have a theory that religion was the first form of internet. It was a communication tool that informed people and offered a storyline and was able to spread across vast swaths of cultures. Then it went digital thanks to technology. Then we humans do what we do best, we fuck up all good things. Pretty soon the Nihilist Arby’s account will be our supreme leader and every test tube child will be taught science online at christianmingle.youporn.com via augmented reality eyewear and Satan will post his first photo on Instagram of him hanging out with The Pope, the Clintons, and all the top CEO’s at the next Bildeberg convention
I am a fan of Christianmingle.youporn.com
OR is internet the last form of religion *goes cross eyed
Devin, I would read a weekly column of 3-4 rants on random subjects.
You don’t feel the burn out so much when you don’t care about your social media. You just have the shitty situation where you are kind of required to pay attention to all that in the name of self promotion. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I’m a normal person I don’t need a strong Twitter game so I just don’t fuck with it that much.
Most people’s Twitter game is literal trash. If you aren’t tossing quote tweets that are big hits or piecing together clever jokes, no one REALLY cares. People are on twitter for the jokes and to get their news. No one cares what your winter fit is, everyone and their mother is wearing layers in winter.
Wow. Just go ahead and @ Will for not caring about his winter fit
lmbo can’t even imagine how trash his twitter game is
Call me the first time you decide to partake in psychedelics, I want to be there when you take your journey
We should all take LSD and then record an 8 hour podcast live from a field as we talk about destroying the band Phish and hippies
Taking LSD and spending 8 hours in a field sounds like a recipe for getting into phish.
Haha I like this guy. Welcome New Guy
I’m in
Sign me up
If it weren’t for your profession I’d say delete it all. I’ve deleted all my shit over the past two years save for insta(I like looking at dope stuff). Twitter was just me reading my own tweets because I think im the funniest person out there, and facebook was just my relatives talking about trump. Snapchat is just stupid friends taking stupid selfies at the same stupid bars they’ve been going to for years. I’ve kept the fomo at bay fairly easily by just reading news websites like a normal person.
Snap stories can fuck off, but I need my snap group chats like I need air to breathe.
Open Snapchat, scroll, close. Open Instagram, scroll, close. Rinse and repeat until you hate all your friends and their exotic lives while you’re in bed by 9
Spread your 6-hour trip to the mountains into 6 weeks of instagram posts.
The good news (about distinguishing native/#sponsored content from the rest) is that the FTC has set forth clear-cut rules regarding proper disclosure of paid content. (See .com Disclosures – FTC March 2013)
The bad news is too many folks either don’t know the tell-tale signs to look for or just don’t care that the content they’re consuming was created with the purpose of swaying them to buy something or think a certain way.
My phone isn’t a distraction. LIFE is a distraction… from my phone. Think about how shitty your life would be without Snap, Twitter, Spotify, Podcasts. What would you do, read Time Magazine? Have your friends over for jello and a SLIDE SHOW? Listen to Touching Base on NPR? There’s no comparison.