The Quieting

Over a year ago, I turned off all notifications and emails for likes, hearts, and stars. Instantly, the noise of the Internet faded away. No more nagging, staticky buzz. The internet went quiet. All the things I’m interested in are still there, but they don’t come at me anymore. They wait. It’s great.

We’re stuck in a rut with social media. Conformity and habit have aligned so many websites to walk the same paths. It’s the natural entropic state of nature, I suppose, to always be adding more diversity and noise and fragmentation. Ding Ding Ding DING DING DING DING. I guess we have all these Like buttons because we enjoy the endorphin-triggering affect of micro-praise, but we lived without it before and we can do without it again. I prefer life without them.

I am really interested in seeing the Internet take a giant step back to 2005, back before Facebook and Twitter and when blogs were the thing. In those days you couldn't respond by clicking an icon. You had to wither comment on their site or write your own post and send them a link. That was nicer.

There’s a lot of chatter out there that blogs might see a little more sunlight soon. Maybe that might happen. Big Blue and the Tweet Machine aren’t going away, but a lot of us are definitely ready to move on to something else. Why not back to blogs? There was nothing wrong with them. RSS still works beautifully. Personal webpages allow for so much more diversity, uniqueness, and originality. Ideas and conversations move slower and more deliberately with blogs. And they never really went away, anyway.

Count me in for Team Blog. Don’t Star this. Write about it.