When did the Internet lose it's appeal?

[prodigy]

I've been thinking about when I first got the internet and hearing those strange noises come through and thinking about the endless possibilities of what I could do that not many people at the time did, it was like an event!

Now everyone is online within seconds and spend majority of their time on only a couple of websites or apps like Reddit where they can mindlessly scroll for hours and rinse and repeat. Everyone wants to talk politics in the never ending culture war. I dont actively go out searching for this stuff but I now know who that Marjorie Greene lady is and I wish I didn't. I really don't care.

It's not all bad, having information readily available within seconds is a good thing when you need it quickly. Unfortunately it also turns people into the well actually guy. You know everything and no one can tell you otherwise people. There is no mysteries anymore.

 

[LogGrad98]

Pretty much every novel thing goes through the same lifecycle, something like: 1) excitement/adoption, 2) discovery/exploration, 3) adaptation into daily routines - normalizing, 4) boredom/taking for granted, disillusionment, and finally 5) obsolescence as it is replaced. The internet as a whole is likely in phase 3 approaching 4 right now for most people. There are still pockets that can generate 2 and 3 and maybe even 1 now and then, but mostly we have normalized it and absorbed it into our daily lives, but many of us are pretty bored or disillusioned about much of it. The issue with the internet is it is unfathomably expansive, there is no way to fully "explore" it. I remember years ago, maybe a decade ago, reading something like if you visited all of the available catalogued web pages one single time as fast as your connection would allow you to get there, non-stop, it would take you well in excess of 1000 years to go to every page on the internet. I can only imagine what that would be now. Like for most people with new technology, they end up cubby-holed into their only little niche corner, and I also read somewhere once that most people only visit maybe 3-5 distinct web sites, with sporadic visits to a few others, and likely no more than 20 in a given week. Those really surfing end up on maybe 100 different sites at one point or another, but even those intrepid explorers only hit 5-10 on a regular basis, if that. We are animals of habit and comfort, so we find what stimulates us just enough to keep it interesting, but where it is safe and familiar enough to provide that comfort and we stay there. At our core, we are really boring. We just want our basic endorphins and to be left to our own devices.

 

[Al-O-Meter]

It's not all bad, having information readily available within seconds is a good thing when you need it quickly. Unfortunately it also turns people into the well actually guy. You know everything and no one can tell you otherwise people. There is no mysteries anymore.

Everyone, as far back as people go, has always known of useless blowhards. There are far more impactful negative consequences of the internet, but I think the good far outweighs the bad. As for mysteries, which is a better song?

This one?

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLqYZ0XDirU


Or this one?

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgF72v0X4BQ


One of my favorite things about the internet is the preservation of human creativity that would have been lost to time had the internet not existed.