https://frieze.com/article/data-roaming

Weist’s idea of creating videos of people using the internet is a way of sharing what it could be if it were widely available. When you log in for the first time in 2016, when there’s very little time to connect, what does the internet look like? The Facebook homepage. When I was in Cuba, I used the internet sparingly: we would find a connection, pull out our internet cards, and in 20 minutes I would check my emails (but not reply to anything), text my friends and family, refresh my Guardian and New York Times apps so I could read them offline, Facebook for a minute, and then I was done. When there’s so little time online, there’s no sense of wandering, no sense of wonder: the curiosity and excitement of following links to discover new things; the time spent reading Wikipedia or a foreign magazine you never heard of until then; discovering new music by suggested YouTube links. Weist’s screencast videos may also reflect on something pertinent to us regular internet users: the idea of surfing the web. It’s something we should all be thinking about: the world wide web used to seem like a network of links, but with the rise of social networks the feed has taken over. You are fed a series of tweets in a chronological order. You scroll down past posts on Facebook. Your news is brought to you in a ‘live’ blogroll with endless, real-time updates. This is how we consume now: the content is regulated, fed to you, never unexpected. To show what the internet means to you and talk about how you experience it could be a way to reflect on these changing attitudes, to take a step back and think about what we lost with the rise of the social web. That said, there’s something almost heartening to Facebook; something to the fact that whenever I glanced at people’s screens in Havana, they seemed to be on Facebook; something to the fact that, when offered access to an almost endless source of information, all people want to do is connect with one another.