The art of building taste with online consumption choices of content and the ways it defines you.

In a world where screen time is through the roof for most, the screentime-healthy-lifestyle-green-vegan-enthusiast-energy-ultra-pro-max folks are trying to figure out ways to manage their screen times while doomscrooling through their day.

Well aren’t we all in some ways guilty of doomscrolling when bored at work or waiting for the metro to arrive and trying to fix it? But don’t you worry just like a lot of the problems there is a fix for this aswell. Part of the solution involves some introspection and observing your consumption choices online.

Before we understand the solution, let’s take a step back and learn how content works on the internet.

The Internet, is a complex web that connects the world by circulating information, news, notifications, and also a lot of spam and noise along the way. The algorithms is the underlying logic that helps define your consumption choices.

Just looking at consumption patterns online as the internet evolved has been pretty interesting. Internet’s initial usecases was about connecting with people real-time which gave the rise to social media. While academics and information was scarce there were pockets of community all across the internet building their own audiences and started off the network effect of things. Internet was a nice to have when it game and quickly became a must have resource for everyone that wants to stay updated and get their job done.

Now that the internet is filled with millions of users. Consumption patterns have changed over time with phones buzzing 24x7 with emails, newsletters, desktop notifications, and all the noise generated that never seems to catch a breath.

When it comes to the way this information is delivered to the user, notifications and optimizing for them have come a long way.

Notification fatigue is a real thing and one of the main reasons why both iOS and Android have multiple ways users can tweak how and when notifications are received.

Endless notifications with excessive screen time from the unlimited supply of real-time information and notifications do the job of draining your energy and putting you out of focus, all the while making you believe something productive was done. Such pity.

With this internet and information boom, the question is how do you manage to keep your online sanity in check and not get overboard where the information starts consuming you?

Less is more.

Consume what is sufficient. As they say, eat only as much as the body needs, eating less than necessary is also fine but eating in excess does the job of bloating your stomach and making you feel uneasy. Excess of anything for that matter is harmful.

With Internet,

• The first step is to reduce clutter and unnecessary noise, discard the average and make space only for content that provides value.
• Optimize to learn from resources and perfect what they teach.
• Leave room to explore and learn to come across new forms and sources of information. Re-read, revise, and relearn(unlearn if necessary).

Consumption

Solving for consumption is just the beginning, information, and knowledge for that matter have the potential to influence your decision-making and manipulate you based on what you consume.

We all have our own interpreted version of the world, influenced partly by the information we consume and the ways we interpret it.

You start building your version of the world in your head from the ingested information and sometimes get lost in it assuming it to be the real way the world functions. Your version of the world can be right or wrong. It depends.

With knowledge, it is important to take things one step at a time and create boundaries while necessary but also leave room for free exploration and see where it takes you.

Just as famous thalis all across India with a wide range of dishes from sour to sweet, the internet is filled with information, and channels like google, reddit and Instagram are the thalis where the chef which is your algorithm that helps cook together the mix of information that best reflects your consumption choices building your taste towards one dish over other present in the menu.