To be really real, unless it’s the people I care about, there isn’t much that excites me in my day that I can point to. Of course, there are random yellow forklifts, and white flowers that remind me of home, and squirrels that come to me, and everything else that are cute, unexpected and exciting, but there isn’t much that I can say that excites me.
But whenever I talk about the internet culture (i know i’m off social media for a while, but i don’t think there’s an overnight shift thats happening right now that i think i’ll miss out on, and if i do, i’ll learn about it later and besides, i do scroll youtube to see if anything is interesting, and if there’s news linkedin reels will have it as well lol), I get really excited. I love how the internet has shaped culture and language around us. I love content creators and creator economy and how people bring a little bit of themselves in each video and influence other people in whatever way that they can. Video as an artform is exciting to me if it’s sufficiently creative. I don’t like the Mr. Beastification of videos, and I don’t like the enshittification of all social media platforms; fomer is the symptom of latter. But even those are markers of culture and internet. As much as I don’t like streamers, a lot of the vocabulary we use today have come from streams. The words that we use originate form the internet, and the degradation of language happens form the internet, and I wonder if enshittification of the internet causes enshittification of culture as a whole, and if so, in what way.
Recently, in a Facebook post (I know, Facebook. Who even uses it, right? We’ll I use it, dipshit. I use it because it’s a platform devoid of your judgemental eyes. And it’s also a platform that I cannot doomscroll because my judgemental eye is too classy for that BS), I talked about how our generation uses the word “crazy” to describe everything that is notable. This phenomenon of vocabulary depletion is a little lamentable (notice how I tried to be better than you by using a wordy word here? lol), but the internet has also blessed us with a lot of great words such as Bet, Simp, Slay, Stan (had to chatGPT this). And that’s cool and fascinating, and wonderful. I don’t know what it is, but the internet gets me excited.
It’s probably the fact that ideas can spread like wildfire. That’s super captivating and hot.
Another thing I care about is Augmented Reality. When I was a kid and didn’t have a phone, I used to spend hours watching videos about latest phones and gadgets. They were relatively new back then, so each new phone that came out (except the iPhone) had something new. There were cool experimental features like look away to pause, waive to answer, press harder to launch somehting. There were phones with two cameras for depth sensing, and then a telephoto camera and then portrait mode. Now that smartphones are mature, there’s not a lot of excitement around them, but every feature we take for granted was some company’s (and hence, some person’s) big experiment at one point that they hoped would catch on.
Today, Augmented Reality as a technology is where smartphones used to be. Everyone knows (I guess not everyone everyone, but I know) its about to happen, but nobody knows what the iPhone of Augmented Reality will be, nor do we know what features its gonna have, or even how people will interact with it. Its so early that I can’t even talk about what certain companies have done yet. It’s mostly research. And researchers have done and have figured out cool new ways to use it and cool new ‘features’ that take advantage of the Augmented reality way of doing things. It is exciting and it makes me happy.
So, I have decided something - I will start talking about these two things that excite me. I will talk about it in linked in, I will make theories and predictions and hypothesis about it and share about it as much as I can on social media, starting with linked in.
I hope things go well. I’m usually not good with it, so I will do a day 1/100 kinda thing and post on linked in about them. Since nobody reads this, you don’t keep me accountable so I am on my own to keep myself accountable lol.
Thank you, Best Regards, Bidwat