I was reminded of RSS feeds the other day, and reminisced on how infrequently I see them. RSS formed a sort of digital printing press for an individual writer. It was incumbent on me (us) as the subscriber, to configure a sequence of writers to read. The printing press of individuals, formed into a custom ‘newspaper’ for our preferences and interests.
Answering what replaced the RSS feed is pretty obvious. Initially it was newsfeeds (in the Facebookish sense). Now, it is reels, clips, and shorts. Curation completely fell by the wayside. People gladly accepted that they would be found in the form, rather than shape the form.
The capacity for watching short form content to habitualise (really, addiction-form), was almost immediate. Reflecting on my own brush ups with doom scrolling, I can identify a few poignant things:
- It happens everyday, usually at set times, or set times and settings.
- I don’t ask for a single thing that appears. The predictive systems underneath are meant to know.
- 9 times out of 10, the content is emotionally provocative.
I came to a couple of conclusions: 1. Scrolling is ritualised 2. The algorithm defines the experience. Precisely, the group defining the algorithm defines the experience. 3. Messaging and worldviews conditioned by the algorithms delivered content is continuous. 4. This orthopraxy, plus lack of agency in the individual shifts the experience from informative, to a rehearsal.
Individual feeds are points to congregate around, and share to others with access to the same platform. The person this forms is not a dupe and not a partisan as those words are usually spent. It is someone whose first map of the morning is a sequence of ranked fragments, and who has practiced, for years, mistaking familiarity for knowledge.
Our feeds are new chapels of propaganda.