If you read my blog last week, you might remember me talking about seing people getting shot on Youtube as a kid and how this affected me for years, making me scared to access anything I understood as “the internet”.
Today I want to link back to that. Because one week ago, funnily enough right after posting my blog, I turned back into the kid who is scared of the internet. Every platform I scrolled through kept showing me the world burning down while Trump is signing away people’s rights, clips of Charlie Kirk getting shot (this still shakes me, no matter what age I am, I cant understand how this can be normalised), Putin using killer drones against Ukraine, the horrible effects of AI and people in Gaza begging for support.
The worst thing about this is that I never feel like I’m allowed to look away, because I am privileged enough to be lying comfortably in my bed, under a roof, watching all of this unfold through an iPhone that is probably causing half of the suffering I see on it. So what I do then is not look away, and fall into what I call “the search spiral”.
Tiktok has become the new search engine, because almost everything happens and gets uploaded on there first. You always somehow find what you are looking for and worst of all, you can jump from one thing to another just by clicking on whatever shows up in the suggestion bar above the video you’re currently watching. This almost forcefully pushes you into this “search spiral”, where you can just keep following a path of information for ever and it’s nearly impossible to get out without being affected.
What happened to me was that I ended up spending an entire evening proving to myself, over and over, how terrible the current times are which led to something dangerous: I suddenly couldn’t see a future for myself, or for anyone in our times anymore. This might sound dramatic, but if you’ve experienced this feeling, you might understand how consuming it is and how important it is for us to be able to picture a future. I couldn’t go through my day without constantly seeing the world burning around me, feeling panicked every time anyone mentioned AI, all while feeling horribly privileged which then led me to feeling bad about feeling bad. I couldn’t function in my daily life anymore.
This is where the search spiral led me and I became scared to access the internet again. I didn’t want to see all the horrors of my time and feeling hoplessly useless. I deleted Tiktok and my other social media platforms and I am officially on what my dad calls a “media detox”. For the next few weeks, I will try to get myself out of this horrible spiral and try to see that the world is not ending because the internet says so, and I will take you along with me on this journey.
I will use this blog to rebuild a healthier relationship with the internet. Instead of looking at all the dangers of digital media and search engines, I will challenge myself to see the other prespectives. To show myself, and you guys, why all of these technological developments are happening, how they were bound to happen and that in their core, they are neutral tools that can either be used in bad or very good ways, depending on who is using them. They wont go away, so I think it’s important to start seeing their strength and where they support us.
I’m going to start putting together a list of points that challenge the negative lens we’ve gotten so used to applying to technology. To let technology bring out its best, we need to start looking for the best in it.
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