The Loss of Interestingness

Jun 07 2008

The web is an amazing being. It brings us virtually everything remarkable from all over the world. Anything that is flashy enough catches your attention for a very short span of time and it fades away into the oblivion. Comparatively, the good old days before the wide spread use of the Internet had more to offer in terms of interestingness and we had many things that caught our imagination.

We had heroes and stories and love and emotions and drama. Now we have the world wide mess, and nothing else. We get loads and loads of forwarded e-mails daily which contains some small tiny entertainment value. It may be a photograph, a joke, a video or a link. Whatever that is, it is there for a split second. The next second, it is gone.

Internet has a lot to offer in terms of information, exploration value and variety that we have no time to enjoy any single thing. We are running from one thing to another. One picture to another. One e-mail to another. One website to another. One person to another. Thousands of new articles are being written everyday in Wikipedia. Thousands of new blog posts come out every day to the wild. Thousands of pictures are posted in Flickr. We can only gasp unbelievably at the overload of information coming our way.

Techcrunch reports hundreds of new startups every month. We don’t have time to catch up with the development and progress of them. We sign-up for an account in some of them and we forget.

I remember the days when we will see a snake nearby our house and we will talk about it for days. Or an accident in the road, or a funny incident that took place, or an outing we had from our school. That magic effect is not there in the Internet.

In the Internet, nothing matters much.

The web gives us lots of entertainment value. It promises a lot in terms of technology. It gives us dreams of huge financial incentives.

But the interestingness is fading.

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6 responses so far

  1. # silkyon 09 Jun 2008 at 8:01 am

    I think this is probably more of a reflection of your own interest in the internet.

    Although I do agree, to a certain extent. It probably takes a lot more for me to be seriously interested in some thing on the internet.

    I think a lot comes from how easily we can share things with our friends. Now it can be done immediately; not even in person, and we can chat about it a bit. So we do that, and then it’s gone.

    Before, maybe we discuss it only in person. And when in, you certainly pay something more attending and end up talking about it longer.

  2. # Niyaz PKon 09 Jun 2008 at 2:15 pm

    Silky,
    True. That is exactly what I was saying.

  3. # Binny V Aon 09 Jun 2008 at 9:57 pm

    I have to disagree with you – I find internet more useful and interesting as time goes by.

  4. # Niyaz PKon 09 Jun 2008 at 10:06 pm

    Binny,
    As silky explained, may be it depends on your perspective.
    Thanks for that comment anyway.

  5. # Nivedon 14 Jun 2008 at 4:04 am

    Interesting-What about web2.0 and all the hoopla surrounding it..?

  6. # Niyaz PKon 14 Jun 2008 at 7:21 am

    Web 2.0 is an intersting thing indeed.
    A lot of ideas and opinions are available now. But the structure of the web/web2.0 is borrowed from the structure of the real human society.
    I don’t think web2.0 will bring any form of community/social innovation that the real world does not display.

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