Clicks, mental malnourishment, and reclaiming humanity
I grew up in an age when the internet was just emerging. Specials on public television talked about how businesses could use the internet to put their products online and how chat rooms would connect people around the world. There was even a TV commercial that hinted at social change: a couple went on a date and, at the end she handed him a piece of paper with her email on it. ("Email me. Wink.") These things are mundane now, but in the early 1990s, they were an absolute revolution, especially for someone who lived on a farm hours from any city.
Growing up in a rural area had plenty of pros and cons. Pros include ample access to nature, good connections with real people, and an overall simple, non-noisy life. The cons were poor access to knowledge resources (the local library, which I haunted regularly, was barely larger than a Pizza Hut) and few opportunities for growth, expansion, or financial gain. I always knew I would leave when I grew up, as there was so much out there in the world and I needed to take sample bites of it.
All of a sudden that world was available to me. At least, a similarly flavored digital representation of that world. I was no longer restricted by my location. In fact, most of the cons of living in the middle of nowhere were erased. If I wanted to know how tsunamis formed, I didn't have to hope for a tsunami book at the library or wait for a documentary on TV, I could simply look it up online. Quite nice.
Looking things up back then was a different experience. You would start with a simple query, find a website that loosely fit the topic, then start rifling through pages, links, webrings, and directories to get where you needed to be. It didn't take long, but it did require more work than it does today. Once you found a site with answers, you likely saw a hand-hewn HTML page created by an individual who was obsessed with tsunamis. Pictures and facts and stories all poured onto the page with little regard to anything beyond "put info on website."
Finding sites then was more like stumbling across a page of a book hidden in a pile of books. The visual similarities were there, too: walls of text, a few simple images. Now, websites are interactive and image-heavy with text written in small chunks to increase whitespace and scannability. Is that better than what came before? I don't think there's a clear answer to that. I can tell you I preferred the before to the now, though.
When you did find something good on the internet back then, you also found an entry point into something worth exploring. That guy with the tsunami page was, as it turns out, from Japan. He created the website because he was practicing written English and wanted to do so away from the stress of classrooms and teachers. You knew this because you checked out the 'about' page and saw it all written out plainly. You then found out that he has a love of sea turtles, so you also check out his gallery and pages about them.
Why did you stick around and read more? Because you were engaging with an output of someone's personality in a human way, just like when you strike up a conversation with someone in meatspace. Answers aren't simple and direct, sentences veer into new territory. It's a wonderfully messy process that we do incredibly well, and it actually translated to this medium.
There was a strong human element to much of what was created on the web before. Part of this was because it was easy for individuals to jump online, make something for fun, and have it found by others. Another part was that early online creations mimicked physical ones, and if you take a look outside, the forest isn't sorted into alphabetized grids.
Berries. Humans like berries.
Humans are upright animals who think they're more precise and rational and clean and perfect than we really are. We strive to move beyond the less desirable parts of our nature, not realizing that some parts may be so hard-wired they can never be fully transcended. We'll always be made out of the same stuff that create alligators and bats and penguins. And there's not a thing wrong with that.
Part of this push steers us toward sterile results. We want to measure and quantify everything so that we can systematize and scale it. This has provided our species with innumerable benefits, everything from medicine to vehicles to pathways to the moon. But the mindset, the attitude behind this has spilled out a little further than perhaps it should, and we think it more powerful and useful than it is.
With the ability to quantify something, we assume we thoroughly understand it. I actually read an essay once that insisted we add stats and numbers to more things so we can "understand it better." (We wouldn't; we'd understand the numbers, which are not the things.) There's this almost deity-like attitude of owning a thing's soul because some math equations predict interactions and behaviors. And because we assume we understand those things, we assume we can understand all things, given enough time and enough math.
This idea has been (rightfully so) applied to every area of life. Every. Single. Area. But it's a race away to something that doesn't fit with our nature and may never do so. A race to the mechanical and quantifiable, both of which are part of who we are, but not the complete picture.
The online world fell victim to this hard. For all the strange and self-serving choices Google has made related to search, SEO, and advertising, it's hard to argue that its ability to search is inferior compared to search engines in the '90s. This is a small comfort, though, because what Google points us to is a more frustrating and less human experience than it was back then.
Today there is this word that hurts me to see: content. I've worked in digital marketing for more than two decades. I know what goes into generating the articles and videos you see online, I know what it takes to make those articles be seen, and I know that a great many of those practices reduce content's usefulness to us humans.
So much of what you see online was made for the purpose of attracting clicks. Clicks, not people. Clicks, not answers to questions, amusing anecdotes, or "just because." Clicks are measurable and scalable and seen as valuable. They're supposed to be a proxy for human interest, but that's just part of the hubris of thinking we can quantify and reduce something as complex as human attention into a few numbers.
Can we even define attention? We can say what it looks and acts like, what it's affects and effects are. But what is it? There are some great attempts, the best of which are essays and treatises completely irreducible to a few numbers.
When the incentive behind creating something is to rack up as many microsecond click events as possible, the methods used will naturally change. How could they not? The goal is to optimize for X, so anything that doesn't directly do that is killed. I've seen it in my own field, where someone proposes an idea or solution that's very human in nature, only for it to be killed instantly as not pushing towards the bottom line.
Take this blog post, for example. If I was writing this with the wider web in mind, I would need to think of a good SEO phrase to focus on. Then, I would need to add the right number and right kind of images, make sure those were tagged with the right hidden information. Honestly, that wouldn't even be the way I would approach it, being someone who has worked in content for so many years. Writing an article doesn't start with inspiration or an idea, it starts with keyword research. What are people searching for, can I get a piece of that traffic, and how can I slant those searches to align with my brand?
Many people insist that SEO is focused on human usability, it just happens that this usability is also good for search engines. I would rephrase that and say these practices aren't intrinsically bad for people, but they aren't the best practices to convey good information or form connections with other people. They accomplish the exact thing they're designed to do: attract clicks. Human usability is secondary.
This holds true for non-web-content things, as well. Take cars. Newer cars have more gadgets and screens than ever before. But we didn't evolve playing with smooth touch screens. We picked up rocks, crafted objects out of other objects, turned buttons and dials that interfaced with our senses in a hard to ignore way.
Why add more screens? Part of us wants that, of course. But the main reason has more to do with what the car makers stand to gain. They get data, they get to reduce costs, they get to remove constraints of having to make buttons so big or so usable. They get to show shareholders how forward-thinking they are.
I've heard plenty of responses saying these incentives are good, that it does benefit us when things are made easier and more profitable for the company involved. To me, that sounds like a perfectly crafted response by a brain that has been hijacked by this very system. Help the feudal lords out and the scraps they throw us will be juicier.
The incentive built here is not for the individual or even for the small group of people. It's for consumers as a whole, numbers on a spreadsheet, which is a vastly different concept than a person in a car. Sure, user tests are still done, but those tests are again reduced to numbers, and back we go to the original problem. It's the same with SEO. The same with healthcare, housing, management, you name it.
I'm not placing blame on anyone for this devolution into Numbers above All. It does bring plenty of benefits. That doesn't mean it's a completely good thing for all times and all things, however. We have to remember the deeper patterns in ourselves. Patterns constricted by flesh and bone, by brains that evolved watching the horizon for dangers and spotting the right berries to pick in a thicket.
I know a craftsman who builds objects that are so strongly focused on human usability it makes me shake my head. Pick up the lap board and you'll find a smooth spot where your thumb naturally goes. Why is that corner shaved down and irregular? Because it could catch when you move the board to stand up. This makes his creations unable to be mass produced, which most people say is a negative. But it's not.
None of this is to say we should abandon our quantifiable pursuits, nor even slow them down. It's also not to say that these old patterns are better than whatever new pattern might emerge. Only that what came before cannot be so quickly abandoned. Trying to do so makes us miserable and mentally malnourished.
Just as "older is better" doesn't automatically track, modernity doesn't automatically equal superiority. We forget this in our broken concept of 'progress as a straight line.' While we might have medicine that cures ailments and the ability to travel to the moon, less-easy-to-measure things can regress. We're both reluctant to admit that and disposed to think the opposite is true.
The internet is has its own rapidly changing culture. Websites can do more things than they could do before, but they also bite into less tangible elements of life. It's great to be able to buy exotic teas from my couch. It's not great that my personal information is then sold to other parties who use it to profile and target me.
Reclaiming a slice of humanity has been on my mind for years. At this point it's an unavoidable thought. I see social movements rising and falling, issues of the day getting discussed and rejected, and all the while there's a clear pattern between them all: people are deeply frustrated and unfulfilled by the world we've created.
Flitting from one social media site to another or reading SEO-optimized copy/paste articles on top 1,000 websites won't bring that satisfaction we're looking for. Taking up a new hobby of coding won't, neither will switching jobs to earn an extra 10k yearly, buying a new car, or anything that pushes us further into the machine. We're trying to fill gaps we feel with whatever is at hand, but the things that are at hand aren't what's needed.
About a year ago I took up a hobby of stone carving. I do everything by hand--no tools that require batteries, plugs, or even that have gears. It's hammers and chisels and files, all of which I hold with my hands and pound using my own muscles. My neck and back often ache after a few hours of carving. I feel that satisfaction when doing it, though. I'm outside, I hear the rhythmic tinking of metal on stone, I feel and smell the limestone dust. And what's even more fulfilling is that I'm accessing all of these real-world things to do something uniquely human: creating objects, sculptures, tools. It's just as human to paint a portrait as it is to abstract the concept of organic website traffic into pure numbers and charts. But the methods required in the former are satisfying unto themselves and lead to more satisfaction, while the methods of the latter are void of that heart.
My only solution to this is the same as most people's solutions--make small movements back to more human things, and keep doing that every day. We can never pull out of the world we were born into, we can only make the best of our time in it. We do live in a wonderfully stable and opportunity-filled world, where simple diseases don't kill us and communication is a thumb-flick away. We just need to lean out of the seduction that comes along with those things and remember the biology that built us is still here, unchanged for tens of thousands of years.