I think the Internet we are facing nowadays is no longer the Internet we envisioned two decades ago. The boom (around 2000 to 2010) had passed and digital capitalism had taken over most of the space online. Advertisements, promoted content, paid partnership, crazy algorithms, drop shopping - these are things that really made it so much worse in the past few years, especially since the start of covid pandemic.
However.
There’s always hope, no matter how small the glimpse it is, out of crisis and dark times. The consumption of data and information should be replaced by slow, insightful and profound consumption of knowledge and sharing instead. Surprisingly I read something recently that the information every individual consume per day on average is around the total information feeding to an individual in 19th century within one whole year. With more information being fed forcibly to us, I think the ability to recognise and filter useful information from a bunch of valueless information is critical to be integrated as part of contemporary digital lifestyle.
This will require us to differentiate what truly matters to our life and bring us value, both intrinsically and extrinsically. A slow living lifestyle will definitely help along this journey. By slowing down our pace of everyday living, we take more time to appreciate and reflect moments in life.
Speaking of community, I think a good community should be small enough to bring up closer engagement for everyone, but meanwhile big enough to build up rapports and ripple inspiration among members.
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