a digital pause — a challenge to speed
Speed has become the defining denominator of the contemporary digital attention industry. Definition: Yet attention, as a human capacity, cannot be accelerated indefinitely.
The disciplinary engagement of Cultural Studies with online spaces has substantially increased over the last years. Ever since the invention and spread of especially the television, and later, the internet, scholarly discussions have focused on how digital media can function to passivize their consumers. In Marxist terms, one could summarize how digital media as a conscious tool brings out a form of alienation (Cray 149), which, as I argue among others, has become even more pivotal in contemporary times the digital attention industry. This economy is marked by producing an overflow of content, which, at the same time is becoming shorter and often, blander, to keep one engaged in scrolling endlessly. As Cray states in his book 24/7, “for much of the twentieth century, the organization of consumer societies was never unconnected with forms of social regulation and subjection”.
According to the author, online media consumption is coined by processes of homogenization, redundancy, and acceleration (33-34), terms to be found in the classic Marxist critique.I made this space as a challenge to the hyper-active character of contemporary digital media consumption. The slow site aims at being a place refusing to track engagement, it strives at being a place without performance. Here, slowness replaces speed and overload with the goal to decelarate your mind.
My name is Clara, I am a student of North American Studies, and I became interested in setting up a digital space aimed at slowness particularily because of my personal experience with social media. In times in which personal media usage more often results in numbness and passivization, I wanted to create a digital space opting for the opposite - calmness, simplicity and a place to pause.
Our nervous systems are not optimized for constant input. From a neurological side, evidence exist that a continuous diminution of mental and perceptual capabilities is rather the result of consumption of online media rather than “their expansion or modulation” (33-34).
Slowness online can be seen as a neurological necessity rather than simply a nostalgic attribute.