Have you noticed the language of consumption purveying the internet? (By “consumption” I mean the act of consuming, not the disease poets got in the Victorian era.) We are “fed” by subscribing to RSS feeds. We follow Facebook and Twitter "feeds" (I racked my brain trying to make “threads” work here, impossible). And all this information comes in bytes.

We Byte and Feed

It is so grossly passive. It makes me think of battery chickens or babies. We receive a feed. Yuck. The language turns us into giant helpless Internet babies being bottle-fed bits of easily digestible information.

But lately it seems we are starting to defy this language. It makes me think of fast food versus slow food. In 1986 an Italian, by the name of Carlo Petrini, started what would come to be known as the “Slow Food” movement. He did this in protest against a MacDonald’s opening near the Spanish Steps in Rome. Slow food became an international movement by 1989. The movement is about taking the time to produce food organically, it encourages buying locally, it highlights food as cultural (avoiding the mono-acculturation of international franchises such as MacDonald’s) and focuses on taking care in preparing it.

A Turn Towards Substance

A few years ago social media was like fast food. We wanted it hot, ready and on the go. We didn’t mind if most of it was pointless gaff. Now, there seems to be a turn towards substance.

All the people that post their gym updates or photos of what they just made to eat are hidden on my facebook feed, ditto all players of Farmville and Mafia Wars. I simply don’t care. Facebook annoys me; it’s tedious (this, however, does not stop me from having it in the background so I can mollify my languid, bored curiosity constantly).

I use Twitter because you can follow things you are really interested in. More and more of my friends seem be expressing the same opinion. And if a twit tweets trash about how “some people should just say what they mean and not blah blah blah” they are unfollowed, swiftly and satisfactorily.

Now, I’m not saying that the information we follow now is lengthy, careful or intellectual. Our average attention span on the Internet is down to 7 seconds and most people only scan articles before they ‘like’ it and leave it. So, the bite-sized bits are still the meal of the day but I think it’s less MacNugget and more gourmet (as in tiny, extremely expensive, generally decent food but without the 20 minute wait and abundance of cutlery).

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