Infocrazy
How the endless scroll made me go analog
A year ago, I walked away from social media — cold turkey. Closed every account, deleted every app and enjoyed the peace that followed. This summer, while starting my studio, I dipped a toe back in, slipped and almost got pulled under again by the algorithm’s undertow. But I crawled out, shook it off and quit for good.
The internet, once revolutionary in how it connected us, now feels completely steered by algorithm-driven search engines, social platforms and online marketplaces. In the endless flood of (dis)information, truth doesn’t exactly disappear — it just stops mattering. The only thing that counts is the narrative.
The evolution of photography feels like the perfect analogy. An analog camera captures a moment as it is — imperfect, unfiltered, grounded in reality. A digital camera, however, invites endless retouching, reworking, reimagining. The moment becomes negotiable. Editable. Optimisable. Somewhere along that shift, the truth becomes manufacturable.
Now narrative has become currency, everyone is consuming or selling in the form of scrolling, but almost no one is actually listening. Everything gets reduced to personal branding or ideological gain. Society polarises: one side versus the other, tribes chanting their dogmas instead of finding common ground. And the scary part? It’s no longer contained online. It’s leaking into the public domain, into politics, into daily life.
Finding my way in the digital era is getting harder. My preferences lean toward imperfection, nuance, slowness — all the things that don’t play well with filters, clickbait and soundbites. The online world wants perfection; I want honesty. It rewards visibility; I’m after depth. Self-development used to mean growing as a person, not sculpting a personal brand. And somewhere along the way, “selling yourself” started to feel uncomfortably close to selling out.
That friction — the widening gap between who I am and what the digital ecosystem demands — is pushing me back into the physical world. To everyday people. To real conversations. To cutting, layering and creating with my hands. To materials that exist outside the screen. Things that feel… real.
The irony of writing about the online world online isn’t lost on me. But choosing a more analog lifestyle doesn’t mean rejecting the digital altogether — it’s more nuanced, it just means I refuse to get lost in it. Peace ✌️ S.Oi
