We met on the Internet

Andre Torrez waxes on about how he’s slowly coming to the realization that we all need to back away a bit from the streams of the web:

I’ve been posting about this a bit, but I think my time off pushed me even further along to where I was going. I won’t say “off Twitter”, but I feel like focusing more on things around the edges of Twitter.

And maybe I am just looking for examples—seeing patterns where there are none—but a few things have appeared that makes me feel like other people are feeling the same way.

I’m with Andre. I’m starting to see a pattern among some of us that have been doing this for nearly 20 years now. The web is speeding up and I keep feeling like I want to put the brakes on. Yet another calling for The Slow Web to really filter the web for us.

Something I want to be clear about though, this isn’t a bunch of old guys yelling "get off my lawn" or yelling that the Internet is too fast and we can’t keep up with it. I want the brakes to be on me not the web. The realtime nature of today’s web is an incredibly good and valuable advancement and I hope it continues. The quicker information spreads around the globe the smaller this world becomes. And that’s an excellent thing. But as an individual I feel a natural inclination to slow down and connect more with the world around me than to be beholden to a torrential river of information that the web provides. I want digests. Rounded out ideas.Permanentthoughts and things. Less is more!

I think we can have our cake and eat it too. We just need to learn how to step onto the shore and only dive into the river when we’re ready to get wet.

/via Mike Monteiro on the Twitter.