Your phone buzzes. A text that reads “heyyyy”.
You jump immediately to answer it.
30 | 6
“WOW, everyone really must’ve liked that selfie! Maybe I should take some more…”
You wonder what your friends have been up to since the last time you checked 15 minutes ago.
You open Facebook for the 17th time today.
“I’m so excited for this entrée I ordered!”
So you snap a picture for Instagram and send a Snapchat to your friends.
This reliance on your phone, my phone, our phones. We’ve become slaves, subjects, to the our tiny, abstract overlords — the Digital Apparatus. The Smartphone™. We have developed a dependence on it and the entertainment and distraction, it provides. Sweet, sweet, social media. Blissful, shallow connection. Mindless scrolling, perusing. Our smart devices are so omnipotent, so robust, that our lives circle around them. Everything is about the smartphone, and everything else is about our engagement with it. Our once broad mindsets and interests have become narrowly focused on deriving pleasure from meaningless “Internet points” a la Facebook shares, retweets, Instagram hearts, Snapchat streaks, Reddit karma. This narrowed focus has blinded us — enveloped us in a form of…
/ Digital Tunnel Vision /
Hello again, traveler. I’m glad you’re here once again. Are you finally fed up with how reliant you are on your iPhone? Instagram? The Internet™?
Are you tired of wasting away in front of your computer screen, scrolling aimlessly through content you know is garbage, but can’t help but keep reading? Annoyed with how tantalizing clickbait is? Pissed about how much time you just wasted when you needed to get work done? Sick of all the damn ads being shoved down your throat?
Are you sick and tired of being sick and tired?
Well, friend, seven weeks worth of hard, intensive work on my part has yielded you a potential aid. I’ve done a lot of analyzing, a ton of complaining, and countless amounts of reading for this blog in order to put together a white paper detailing how the Internet we once knew has died — and has taken our cognition and autonomy with it.
I’ve titled it:
Tunnelvision
The Death of the Internet (And Our Autonomous Cognition)
Okay, so it’s not exactly about hysteria. I’m not actually hysterical, either. I’m just passionate about [not] losing the old web we used to have and hating that social media has ruined all the nice things we’ve built up for ourselves.
In this paper, I analyze how the current Internet has devoured the old Internet, which was filled with treasures like GeoCities, LiveJournal, and other resources intended for enriching and educating one’s life and mind. Today’s Internet has become entertainment and media-based with a focus on flashy visuals and wild headlines, all geared towards making us click, click, click.
No more. No more clicking. No more scrolling. It’s time to stop. It’s time to stop allowing the Internet, “Big Viral”, and “Big Social” to use us for their own gain and revenue. It’s time we took back control of these tools and the autonomous cognition we have sold in exchange for absentminded LOLs and hearts.
So how do we cope with this newfangled form of tunnel vision?
The internet you used to know is gone. Algorithms do all your thinking for you. Your brain can’t function without distractions or social media. What are we supposed to do — how are we supposed to function — in this dystopian world of dependency?
Well, Start Here.
Download my white paper and diagnose your own tunnel vision. Allow me to aid you in both of our journeys to a life filled with more productivity and increased wellbeing — and less shallow and meaningless distraction.