SOCIAL ENTROPY

#psychology #socialentropy #digitalconnection #socialisolation

The sky wore its insomnia like a black sequin dress, flickering violently with unearthly murmurs. A pale glow leaked from the cracks in the atmosphere, as if God Himself had left the TV on. My fingertips twitched in time with the static, body shivering not from cold but anticipation, like the moment before a needle strikes vinyl. Everything hummed with an almost erotic charge, a tension so thick it could be plucked and strummed like a cello string. And then, without warning…

Welcome to the World Wide Web. – That great shimmering web of cats and pornography, born sometime in the foggy backrooms of the 1980s when someone thought it’d be a splendid idea to let computers talk to each other.

Cyberspace, – they called it. An “electronic frontier” which made it sound rather romantic, like a wild west of thought, when in fact it was mostly ASCII porn and chatrooms where grown adults pretended to be wizards. John Perry Barlow even wrote a Declaration of Independence for it, which I guess, was… cute?

By the 1990s, the “Information Superhighway” – yes, nothing says digital revolution like a metaphor involving traffic jams and potholes. Al Gore, bless his recycled paper heart, tried to make it sound modern. Unfortunately, the superhighway soon became a roundabout with twenty exits, none of which signposted.

Surf forward a few years and the dreams of freedom and intellectual utopia were replaced by a slightly damp corner of the internet where everyone shouted at each other and no one knew how to spell “definitely.”

Suddenly, with an army of dancing hamsters throwing Viagra popups at you, you arrived at Web 2.0, Congratulations, you’re now the product!

And before you could say it was “Peanut Butter Jelly Time”, everyone had a blog. – RandomBoo was born, Guestbooks filled, Flash animations swarmed us with dancing badgers to the tune of chocolate rain, straight into the swag bag of eBaum’s World. And there, then in that moment of Myspace and Wikis, at the peak of mankind, came the first recorded Rickrolling.

Soon the internet became known as a “stream” flowing under the banner of Facebook, sewage water invested with birthday announcements, minion memes, and political rants by someone you barely remember from school. And you didn’t navigate anymore – you scrolled, endlessly, like pushing a pram through a war zone.

And now? Now we live in the “cloud” where all your memories are stored somewhere between heaven and a server room. Your thoughts curated by algorithms. What began as a noble quest for knowledge ended with an infinite scroll.

From the very beginning we told ourselves what it was, we named it, from space nets to surfing webs. Now we called it “The Internet”, – cold, mechanical, impersonal. A name that clunks like a shopping trolley with a wonky wheel, designed not to inspire wonder but to process it.

And we didn’t just lose the quest, we lost the connection. For like the dilution of currency, by being connected to everyone, we have ended up being connected to no one. – like social entropy.

:: REFERENCES ::