If a thousand such flowers were to bloom, perhaps the internet’s landscape would become more humane.
Pony offers a modest but realistic alternative: a somewhat novel way of doing one specific thing online slightly more deliberately than you did before. But newcomers don’t have to play by the same rules. Maybe we can build our way toward fewer of them.įacebook and YouTube and Twitter and TikTok and their ilk are unlikely to reduce engagement on purpose, because their businesses rely on maximizing it. Our suffering arises, in part, from the speed and volume of our social interactions online. But now it’s clear that the internet needs design innovations-and brake mechanisms-to reduce its noxious impact. I used to find such projects appealing for their subversiveness: as art objects that make problems visible rather than proposing viable solutions to them. Other technologies of unhurriedness include Dialup (a surprise-phone-call app), Slowly (a pen-pal service), and Mail Goggles (a Gmail add-in to prevent email regret). In 2007, the Near Future Laboratory made Slow Messenger, an IM appliance that would reveal messages only if you cradled it in your hand last year, the artist Ben Grosser created the Minus social network, on which you can post only 100 times. The work falls into a long tradition, part conceptual art and part whimsy, that emerged in response to the oppressive instantaneity of the internet.
It’s slow email.ĭmitry Minkovsky has been working on Pony over the past three years, with the goal of recovering some of the magic that online life had lost for him. Think of it as email, if email arrived by post: You compose a message and put it in an outbox once a day (you can choose morning, afternoon, or evening “pickups”), Pony picks up your outbound dispatches and delivers your inbounds. That relic is also the model for a new personal-communication app called Pony Messenger. For talking to people, I use email and text and social networking. I receive ads and bills, mostly, and the occasional newspaper clipping from my mom. The service remains essential, but not as a communications channel. My postal carrier drives her proud van onto the street and then climbs each stoop by foot.
0 kommentar(er)
