My earliest memory of the digital space was really just a lot of anticipation. There was so much to look forward to, and so much of the process got noticed. Before Wi-Fi was seamless, it was a process. I remember sitting in front of the laptop, watching the connection bars crawl upward, waiting for the computer to sign me in. The pause wasn’t yet a nuisance; it was simply part of the transaction. A spinning wheel or a buffering line wasn’t dead time. It was a built-in feature of digital life, a reminder that you were crossing into another space.
In those years, anticipation structured the experience for the younger me. Before YouTube played instantly, you tracked the progress bar like it was a timer. Before Spotify could shuffle endless playlists, you downloaded songs one by one. Even messaging carried suspense: waiting for the “…” bubble to appear, or for a ringtone to confirm delivery. These weren’t just technical delays. They were rhythms the medium imposed, and they shaped how you interacted with it.
Alvin Toffler described the rise of a “blip culture”, a society organized around fragments, short clips, and bursts of content.1 Looking back, those pauses were part of that culture too. Buffering, loading, and waiting weren’t interruptions of digital life; they were integral to it. Anticipation was one of the fragments through which early digital life was experienced. In that sense, the “economy” of anticipation was about more than content: it was about how small delays and pauses created value by giving digital interaction its rhythm.
Marshall McLuhan’s phrase “the medium is the message” reinforces this idea. McLuhan argued that the real significance of media lies not in the messages they carry but in how they reorganize human perception and social interaction.2 The message of the early internet was not just the videos or emails on the other side of the connection, but the temporal structures it introduced, click, wait, load, respond. As Digital Media and Society3 explains, “media are environments… they offer certain ways of relating to the world, while at the same time establishing boundaries for what can be said, done, [or] expressed”. Anticipation was part of that environment: a boundary condition of the medium itself.
That structure has mostly disappeared. High-speed connections, auto-play, and algorithmic feeds have flattened out anticipation. A delay of more than a second feels broken, not suspenseful. The friction that once defined online interaction has been engineered away. We no longer notice the transition into digital space because, in effect, we are always in it.
McLuhan warned that when technologies become familiar, they numb our awareness.4 Anticipation once acted as a threshold between offline and online, a moment that marked the crossing into a new environment. Now, that threshold has dissolved. Connectivity is constant, and the act of “going online” has disappeared into the background of everyday life.
This shift highlights how quickly media reshape cultural expectations. Waiting, once normal, is now intolerable. Efficiency has replaced suspense. The result is speed, but also a flattening of experience. Everything is available instantly, and because of that, very little feels worth waiting for.
Sources:
Lindgren, Simon. “Digital media and society.” (2021): 10-35.
Recent Comments