Information at Your Fingertips – And In Your Inbox

We get a lot of information, and often, it comes with a subscription

Photo by Unlimited Access on Unsplash

Maybe you remember how it was, back then, when we had newspapers, made of real paper? Delivered to us in the mailbox each morning.

Newspapers were originally quite small in every way. Small format, a few pages only, and distributed to the right group of people – those who sympathized with the purpose of the newspaper, it’s ideology, so to speak.

Because, that’s how they worked in the beginning – they spoke about the world and what happened on the basis of a certain viewpoint, which could be liberal, for instance. Very many newspapers were liberal, as this was an early idea that appeared in the second half of the 1800s, at the same time as everybody became city-dwellers rather than country boys and girls, now having some time after work where they couldn’t do much else than just sit in their apartment and read the news.

Radical was a tough word, but liberal was more free (!), and both actually denoted a breach with the conservatism, that had been prevailing in parts of the world, mostly Europe, for centuries.

Reading a liberal newspaper was, thereby, freeing. It made people feel that they broke some traditions and became modern.

Socialist newspapers appeared along the way as well, and when more political directions appeared, these also got their newspapers.

Of course, after a while, the ideology often gave way to the search for profit. Newspapers grew in size, mostly to make room for more advertisements, so they got bigger formats and more pages, and they also, gradually, introduced many new topics, to make people want to buy and read the newspapers. More readers meant higher prices for the ads, so it became cardinal to the companies behind them to pump up the number of readers anyway they could.

Free newspapers appeared along the way, as this was considered a way to catch many of those who didn’t want to pay for one. They were free in an economic sense, but the contents were everything but free, often paid for by sponsors and advertisers.

All in all, the lifecycle for newspapers looked exactly like the one we have seen later for social media and their influencers:

First, it is about providing some wanted information, then it becomes all about growth, and, finally, the focus moves to monetization.

The original information is lost along the way, and the amount of readers becomes the most important for a long while.

When newspapers grew, we came to pile up the more and more voluminous newspapers, struggling to get them thrown out before they took up too much of our living space. We also found out, that the loads of “information” in them, wasn’t. There were lots of words and pictures, but most of it had no relevance to us. Yet, some of us kept receiving these in our mailboxes long after we had effectively stopped reading them.

Influencers and their newsletters are a modern equivalent, as mentioned, and it works the same here. Focus is on getting more readers, nominally, in the shape of the number of subscribers. If you are an influencer and have 100,000 subscribers, you can charge higher prices from your sponsors than if you have 5,000 subscribers. Just like the newspapers.

For that reason, everything you do on the internet seems to lead to a subscription. People are so eager to “grow their followings”, that they often sneak in a subscription to all people who just want to read one of their articles online, or people who buy something in their webshops, or, they simply buy email addresses on the dark web and start adding these to their subscribers lists.

Big is better in that world. Many leads to money.

For you in the other end, things are going like with the newspapers, those made of paper. They became bigger and less interesting, most were never read, and they were just stealing your living space – in a sense, stealing your freedom. Instead of feeling free because you felt modern, you became enslaved by the monotonous tasks that came with the subscription, about making order and throwing out.

Maybe you also became worried about the environment, since the huge amount of big newspapers took their toll on the woods, being cut down for making paper. And the paper itself, with polluting ink on them, ended up in waste deposits all over the world.

Freedom had become slavery.

And the newsletters are doing the same to you. You may get stressed by the sheer amount of newsletters in your inbox, and you may feel something negative, such as bad conscience, because that nice influencer keeps sending you the newsletters and yet, you never read them. Or annoyance, because you can’t find the real emails, those that are actually written for you to read, personally, between all the newsletters.

And if you are well-informed, you also start getting worried about the environment, as the enormous amount of data, and Internet traffic, connected with the newsletter hell, consumes a lot of energy, used by lots of electronic equipment like computers and routers and hard drives, and it all consumes, apparently, most of our sparse supplies of drinking water for its cooling.

And all for nothing, since you are never reading the newsletters.

The paper newspaper could be used for wrapping around fish, if you sold such food, or around other things that you wanted to stow away for a while, or send in the mail. So, some of the burden that the original longing for freedom had given you, could be off-loaded and explained as good.

But what good is there about the old newsletters? How do you get anything back from that dream of freedom that turned into the opposite?

Well, most people eventually found out how to cancel their newspaper subscriptions. Now we just have to learn how to cancel the newsletters.

You see, freedom starts with understanding that you have lost it – after that, a small action is often enough to get it back.