What am I getting from the internet?

written at the indieweb meetup in 20ish minutes, based on the prompt: why am I on the internet? what do I want from it?

What am I getting from the internet? The answer to this used to be self-evident back when I accessed it from a dial-up connection in 2009. There was the real world context that I inhabited, and the internet was a portal where I would access information from distant worlds.

Today, the internet is not an entity cleanly demarcated from the real world context I inhabit. In fact, it is the context. It influences culture and day-to-day interactions ambiently. The internet has also been suffering from a chronic bout of information diarrhoea. There's too much stuff out there, and not a lot of it is worthwhile or even healthy to consume. Some deliberation over why am I here is warranted. When I open my web browser or my apps, what am I trying to get from it?

In my conscious usage of the internet there's a few patterns I am seeing. The first one is to expand on the local world and context I inhabit. A concrete example of it is that when I finished reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance recently, I could expand the universe created by this book, by looking up what other people are saying about it. I used twitter's search function to see what interesting accounts I follow have said about it, and what the discussions looked like. Or eat food from a cuisine I haven't tried before, I could go down a Wikipedia rabbithole to provide historical context for the delicious thing I just ate and why it exists the way it does.

The second pattern is closely tied to the first. The expansion of my local context is made possible through participation in these forums and communities. I feel a deep satisfaction with creating things. Participation is an underrated form of creation. It leads to chains of people across various contexts to build on each other's thoughts. This sets the base for other people looking to expand their universe on a thing that they encountered in real life. The lovely thing about this is that it feeds back into the real life context I exist in, and provides a way for those in other contexts to expand their world just like I would.