Internet Dreams

This blog post is part of the Agora Road Travelogue for January 2024

I consider myself to be an Internet citizen, a netizen, if you will. I've been browsing the web for as long as I can remember, on the days in which such endeavor was considered "geeky" or "nerdy". That's right, I've come from the far away past in which the most common avatars one could encounter on online forums were references to videogames or anime, rather than the homogeneous mass of selfies that today one encounters when login in, and whose major legacy will be feeding the algorithms that ought to replace us.

I'm not going to fall into the fallacious (although tempting) narrative that the Internet used to be better back then. Quite the contrary, the Web is so good nowadays that we cannot imagine our lives without it. The cyberspace, thus, has been conquered, built upon and commodified for us electronic tenants to sublet a little space on. Our Facebook, Instagram and X's profiles are the digital equivalent of our just as unaffordable meatspace lifestyles, constantly so close, just a few $19.99 payments away, and, still, perpetually out of grasp.

These developments in the field of marketing have little by little corroded the humanitarian roots of the Internet, the public Internet, that is, given that we cannot ignore the military origins of such an invention. No, it was not until the Internet was deemed as too good to be kept private that the real motivation behind it arose, the human necessity for connection, for establishing bonds among peers, to share and receive only when one has given.

As such, this connection-through-computers is but the last successful attempt our species has done in the field of reaching other human beings and, while it would be easy to classify the Internet into the same category that the telegraph and the telephone, I believe this class of devices is but a subcategory of a larger set of human activities whose objective is the communication between persons.

Of particular interest for this article is oneiromancy, that is, the lost art of predicting the future based on dreams. While our psychoanalytical modernity promptly takes us to the dismissal of such dark age practices, I believe there is a case to be made in grouping classic oneiromancy and the psychoanalytical interpretation of dreams within the same category, that is, the overall belief that dreams convey knowledge that escapes our conscious mind. We believe that by analyzing the images and sounds from dreams we will be able to figure out something about ourselves. Thus, we have exchanged the role of dreams from a window to see outside the dreamer, that is, predicting the future, to a window to see inside the dreamer.

The relationship that this general oneirology maintains with the Internet resides in the transmission of ciphered content to the conscious part of the mind mainly through images and sounds. It could be argued that, while the Internet transmits messages between two individuals, dreams transmit messages between the subconscious and conscious parts of the brain within a single individual. If we proceed this way, it is not hard to visualize the Internet and the act of dreaming as two very similar phenomena. Moreover, we have also imposed to the Internet the duty that we once imposed on dreams, that is, the false idea that it holds the answers to every questioning of ours.

An interesting thought that arises from such a comparison is when we try to establish the signal-to-noise ratio of, say, scrolling 15 minutes on Facebook. If we are talking about the replication of ideas, as in the original definition of meme, then we can classify every non-attaching idea as noise. Given the large amounts of noise thus defined, the similitude of web content with that of dreams content increase to the point in which we can actually visualize mindless scrolling as a counterpart to the passive act of dreaming.

And just as there are unhealthy sleep patterns, there are unhealthy Internet-browsing habits. I personally believe that the detachment of the Internet from a specific position in front of a designated household item, or, in other words, the fact that we carry a mobile Internet-browsing device everywhere instead of relying on a desktop computer, and that we can access the net from the comfort of one's bed or bathroom, has brought negative consequences in our Internet-browsing patterns. The issues that arise from these behaviors is precisely a decrease in the signal-to-noise ratio. By continually scrolling through the day we have reduced the importance of the overall Internet content consumed and, as such, we have deprived it of its higher meaning or, more accurately, we have deprived ourselves of the ability to decipher the contents of the Internet.

What can we do in order to browse healthily? How can we purify our web content such that we can extract from it insightful meaning instead of relying of it as a high-tech equivalent of a white noise machine. The first recommendation would be to be more conscious about our time browsing the web. I’m not saying that we should go back to printed dictionaries instead of just googling the meaning of a word, but at least on our spare time, when we feel like doing nothing, we do not turn to our phones for a quick hit of dopamine. Instead, surfing more consciously, being aware that whatever content we might post can inspire others and that we can be inspired by what others are posting.

As such, the best way we have to make our Internet experience better is, just like sleeping, assigning to it a chunk of time from our day-to-day, so that we make the conscious effort of getting the most of it while lurking on websites.