Ever notice how the Internet, in mimicry life itself, appears more and more like a game room in a casino? The lights around us have never been brighter, sounds never louder, fury never greater. Going to any given Internet site in this day in age is pulling the handle of the slot machine. You don’t know what you’re going to get, but it’s going to be colorful and interesting and loaded with whistles and bells, refreshed each time. Plus, you can always give it another spin and see what new interesting stuff you can get absorbed by. This ability is still quite new to humanity and the addictiveness seems to be setting in.
The obvious examples are the social media outlets: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and that lot. View them on any screen and just scroll or swipe through content of your choosing, or their choosing for you, scrolling through post upon post upon another post, on and on, and on, and on…and so on and so forth through a never-ever-ending media-scape of content tailored for your eyes and the brain behind it, echoing back what you like and stimulating those desires all the more.
Then there are sites like bleacherreport.com and beautypackaging.com/contents/view_breaking-news/2017-10-06/bluemercurys-barry-beck-receives-top-recognition, conventional websites designed to impart information, but with modern coding and user sensibilities they impart mega-loads of info by use of the infinitely scrollable webpage letting the observer go for a swim in their content.
When first the Information Age came about, with phrases like “information superhighway” coming into (and eventually dropping out of) vogue, there wasn’t the breadth and depth of content - let alone sufficient bandwidth - to provide a never-ending webpage the likes of which are common today. Now, with the online world melding into the real one and our behaviors following suit, we can be the biggest gluttons for info that we want to be…whether we’re learning anything from it or not.
