Welcome to the Second Edition of #SlowScroll: the slowest corner of the internet.
This week’s theme for the #SlowScroll is A Sense of an Ending.
If this is your first time reading the #SlowScroll, you can read more about the concept here if you’d like.
Welcome to the internet
Have a look around
Anything that brain of yours can think of can be found
We’ve got mountains of content
Some better, some worse
If none of it’s of interest to you, you’d be the first.
The internet is infinite. Like a gas, it can expand to fill up whatever empty time and attention you give it.
What I’ve found really goes missing is the sense of an ending. The feeling you get when you reach the last page of a book. When you see “Fin” or “The End” on the big screen. When your plane touches down after your vacation. In an attention-based economy, these wonderful feelings are considered tragedies.
Instead of giving you a sense of an ending – a vantage point to reflect on your journey – the internet is forcing us all to get a sense of longing. Movies now have scenes “mid-credits”, basically trailers for the next instalment stitched into the end. Creators beg for you to subscribe, because the next edition is somehow going to be bigger, better. The autoplay & feed algorithms bring up the next thing before you have any time to think about what you just saw.
This week, we have: two articles, one episode from a Netflix show, a book and a Question: Engage with them however you like, whenever you like. If you have more resources to share that fits with theme, share it with us or the world?
📺 Film vs Television from Voir (Watch on Netflix)
Voir is one of those very few shows that I’m actually glad is on Netflix. It is a collection of visual essays around the history of cinema.
Although I’d love for you to watch the whole show, ‘Film vs Television’ is the episode that had me thinking about what a medium does to the show’s aesthetics, its characters and the relationship its viewers have with them.
Oh and the best part, each episode is about twenty minutes long, and has a very satisfying ending. If you are watching Voir, and have a strong stomach, don’t miss “The Ethics of Revenge”.
🔗 Podcasts: Is the medium still at the heart of the ‘slow web’? (Read Here)
Author: Rohan for Scroll
Blogging (at least in the old days) relied on RSS (Really Simple Synchronisation). It wasn’t long before this changed. If you were online in the “web 1” era, you might remember the drama around Google Reader. Now, most blogs are hosted on a select few platforms, while a select few choose to self-host them.
This article, although a couple of years old, talks about how this is happening to podcasting. Will the medium resist the same fate as has happened to every other medium on the internet?
A quote from the article:
“Podcasting’s “bugs” – difficult to scan, share, comment on – are actually its features. With Facebook and YouTube’s ceaseless sneezing, publishers are very much in need of podcasting’s antiviral cure.”— Jake Shapiro, CEO, RadioPublic
🗞 The Infinite Scroll (Read Here)
Author: Josh Worth
Traditional information sources are sequential. It’s one piece of information, then something new, then something newer. All tied together by some theme or story. On most places on the web, it is the exact opposite. It is an infinite reverse scroll in a random order as they occur to the mind of the creator.
This piece wants to gently ask you what this design is doing to our sense of time and story. A beautiful read!
An excerpt from the piece:
“With the never-ending updates appearing at the top, it’s not the unfolding of a story that compels us to continue reading downwards, it’s the fear that we might’ve missed something.”
📖 Abundance: On the Experience of Living in a World of Information Plenty (Get the Book)
At the heart of the ‘information overload’ issue, this book does a brilliant job at connecting the different factors that are at play when it comes to living in a world of information plenty.
If you end up reading this book, which I recommend you do, it’ll definitely remind you of this quote: “It is only the dose which makes a thing poison.” (Paracelsus)
We hope, over the course of the next few days, you take the time to check these pieces out and think about the sense of an ending. Do you miss living in a world that allowed for endings? Or was that never the case?
One final question:
What’s your favorite thing that ends?
That’s it from us. Don’t forget to take a break from all that scrolling, and find your calm. Our social profiles (especially on Instagram) may help you do that.
