Lost in Space

Clear to here

So… have you ever reached saturation point on a platform’s feed?

Saturation point is where you have read everything or seen everything that you thought was interesting and now you just start getting repeat posts or videos appearing.

Saturation point is when there’s nothing new so all the old stuff or repeated topics spill over your eyes and run down the feed not even getting a pity like as you scroll past.

On YouTube I felt the feed was stale…

…it had become porridge… densely bland with no sugar rush involved.

But there was this tempting button…

Which I wondered what would happen if I pushed it…

So I did…

Clear all watch history…

Wow I thought!

Maybe if I push this button I can rebuild a new and interesting feed…

And with renewed enthusiasm I selected the Home page and was greeted with this…

GAH!!!!!!!!

Nothing!

Nada!

And then the moment of fear… I have nothing to watch… what do I search for? How do I’m toasted, how do I get my digital porridge back?

And then I thought - how interesting that I’ve become reliant on algorithms to determine my watching and reading habits… when did I surrender to the algorithms instead of selecting only what I wanted to watch?

I really try to train feeds to only dish up what I want…

… which is like trying to bail out a river…

Some of my online friends never use feeds, they only use notifications and/or go direct to the profiles of people they value and read/watch their content. This is incredibly efficient…

I had become a couch potato social media surfer - in fact I wasn’t surfing waves at all - I was floating in the current and going wherever it took me without thinking about it. Sometimes I’d wave to people I knew floating past, tell them I liked their lilo or sea biscuit before they would get washed away by another current.

There’s a lot of talk about being mindful or being present - weirdly often espoused on social media but platforms are designed to mimic slot machines with endless rerolls of the same fruity icons to keep us locked in.

I’m not bashing platforms I’m just recognizing that I’d been in a hypnotic daze and that daze can only be created by me not searching specifically for content that interests me.

YouTube will give me videos of how to build stairs, tie knots, unblock washing machines, explain why Microsoft 11 is the worst thing since unsliced bread and uneart more history facts and fiction than I can shake a trowel at… but I have to first go looking for them…

And… if I stop looking it will just dish up digital porridge until I go nuclear and hit the clear watch history button.

Its easy to lose focus and get swept away by algorithms.

It requires discipline to stay focused and chose what we want to consume instead of accepting whatever is dished up.

I’ll probably get hypnotized again by the algos - but for the moment its kinda refreshing having a blank page on YouTube… for one thing I suddenly have a whole new desire to read books again at night instead of watching another episode of UK panel shows or re-runs of Time Team (if you haven’t watched Time Team you’ve missed one of the greatest shows ever to come out of the UK)

Wishing you joy as you either focus your time or go with the flow