I think there is another post here somewhere (found it -CBC) which makes the same point in greater detail, but I cannot stress enough how strongly I believe this. Two more articles I read today continue to beat the drum punctuating the internet’s rapid fall from the mountaintop of human experience.
The Future is Local. This does not mean that people will turn away from global culture. There will still be K-Pop fans, Russian goths, and other Very Online™ people; but they will use these global identity traits to find meaning among their friends and neighbors in person, rather than an anonymous clique of forum users on the disenchanted, sterilizing network of computers that have dominated our lives since around 2008. Networked computers aren’t going anywhere; they’re just moving to the backseat.
The Future is Physical. Digital artifacts are dismally fucking boring. It’s as simple as that. People aren’t reading magazines on the internet because reading text on the internet is an awful experience. Building a collection of streaming music is about as exciting as sorting paperclips. We do it, but we don’t enjoy it. Watching videos on the internet is what it was like to watch TV in the decades before. You can have a good time, but it doesn’t stick like going to a movie or buying a disc (or a tape, for that matter). Looking at art on Instagram or the web is like watching free porn; do it long enough and you’ll make yourself crazy for the real thing. For all these reasons, the internet cannot take the place of physical things in our lives.
Print, burn, press, paint, draw, record. It’s the way of the future.
C.B. Crenshaw 