The End of the Extremely Online Era

ARE YOU EXPERIENCING POSTING ENNUI?, newyorker

Kyle Chayka’s latest column explores “posting ennui,” a growing reluctance among young social media users to share casual moments online. “I feel like everyone in my generation is kind of a voyeur now,” said 24-year-old Kanika Mehra. “People don’t want to be perceived,” and if they do post, they “feel a... See more

My current-day interaction with the internet seems to contain ever fewer of these portholes and chance encounters. If the internet is a superhighway, it feels like there are fewer exits, and you’re expected to keep traveling to the same places over and over again, based on your past behavior (and purchasing history). In fact, the highway always see

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The Internet lacks closure, not in some cloying therapeutic sense, but literally. At every moment a website can be surfed, linked, crawled, or refreshed by any one (or several million) of billions of browsers. The net isn't "read" like a book, "watched" like a movie, nor "attended" like the theater -- it is "browsed." The word itself suggests a res... See more

However, when it comes to the current internet we have, the city where we live digitally, I can’t feel any message of ambition. Yes, Amazon told me, “You should buy more stuff,” Facebook told me, “You should talk to your friends,” Netflix told me, “You should have more entertainment.” But the Internet itself has no strong message, but a lot of nois... See more