Do You Miss the ‘Quietness’ of the Internet?

Photo by Kristina Flour on Unsplash

There’s always a pendulum swing as time changes, where at a time blogs were the hottest thing since sliced bread. Now we’ve been in the deep social media era for the past 15 years and eventually that will change too.

But I’ve seen both booms and apart of me misses the quietness of reading a blog and closing the tab. Sometimes I’d read a comment or perhaps leave one, but the comments were just there. They weren’t incessant and or in live time. Maybe someone would respond to your comment a year later. There were small aspects of social media with myspace, chatrooms and blogs but we didn’t have them on our phones, we didn’t have apps like we have today.

So what did we do? We came home and went to our desktop computers and scrolled or interacted and then we shut down our computers.

I understand one doesn’t have to be on social media but let’s be real, it is quite addictive and it’s also a very convenient way to stay in touch with our friends and family. Some of us have businesses on social media or work in social media and trying to not be on our phones/computers 24/7.

I started out as a blogger for my travel website, Traveling Jersey Girl. Maybe I’m feeling nostalgic lately because I miss writing for the sake of writing. Not having to concern myself with curating content to feed any type of algorithm, or feel pressured to make my grid look cute. I wrote to the world and whoever stumbled upon it did just that. It wasn’t filtered. I’m not saying my content is, I’ve never really followed trends but I guess I miss seeing uniqueness.

I feel like social media has become this factory of cookie cutter ideas and my feed no matter where I turn is the same. And now with AI, it seems even worse, but most of it is stolen ideas. Perhaps I’ve become cynical of the social media world but I don’t think it’s that hard not to.

I have an intuitive feeling blogs will make a comeback because people want to slow down. People want to be able to digest content and leave satisfied rather than scarf down fast food like content to only be hungry again for more. Maybe I can start a trend of blogging again, bring back the raw unfiltered content where you can read my writing, digest, leave a comment or not and close the tab.

So I invite you to take a seat at my writing table and let my words simmer slowly into your mind. Take one bite or come back for seconds. My hope is that this ‘quieter’ side of the internet will satisfy your appetite.