Digital Age Dilemma

When born with a smartphone, it’s hard to comprehend what life would be without the Internet or the Internet.

I was born in the age of the Internet. Of course, the Internet was not widespread and was not cheap. You had to learn about basic computer things at 14 years old. For my tenth high school class, I was tasked with creating an email ID. Imagine one of your exams is to create an email ID. Today’s generation would have ten different IDs for different purposes. We were naive, young and new to the Internet world.

Going on the Internet means going to Wikipedia to complete your project. It has all the information you need to write about. Although Wikipedia is a great source collector, it got banned from many institutions as it made the project easier for students. The irony was at its best when AI took over the world, and now ChatGPT and other apps like these are banned from doing assignments in college.

You usually suspect apps or websites like Facebook, WhatsApp, Orkut or Gmail when you go online.

But when you search for any keyword in that search bar, you are thrown thousands of searches. It’s millions, but mostly it is spam. Despite this, thousands of legitimate companies are doing the work and can be part of your community for the next month or year.

For example, if you search for marketing, you can find the legend Seth Godin, a substack about marketing, and all kinds of folks. How do you decide whom to follow and what direction to take?

It’s overwhelming and almost reaches decision fatigue. You end up doing nothing as if you have no choice. Sometimes, having few choices works in your favour. For example, back when TV was a thing, you had limited channels — so whatever was the movie that night, you either watched it or not. That’s it — two simple choices. Now, if you open up Netflix, you have a platter of 100 movies — a mix of old and new, all squeezing to catch your attention. People often click on the latest movie or spend hours deciding what to watch and watch a random YouTube video instead.

How do we go about in the digital age?

This is where the curators come in. You need to work to find the curators you can trust and who match the taste. They do all the filtering and recommend the top 10, and now you have to test them to see if they work for you.

The second option is to become the curator. Try three similar services at a time and then choose the best. Depending on how crucial it is for you, you can repeat this process every month or every 5 years.

For example, what is the best email approach? Free or Paid.

Gmail, Yahoo mail, protonmail, and many other free services are available.

For paid, there is Fastmail, Hey and many others.

Try the recommended ones and some small startups for some time, and draw your top apps or websites to use.

It’s a constant choice struggle,e but that’s the bane and boon of the Internet. The Internet only started the Internet journey.