“They just want to hear stories”

I keep thinking about what my husband’s aunt said over dinner last week. She leads an over-90 group at her retirement village. Every time they meet, someone shares their life story, and she themes the food and decor around it.

She said that people ask to come and speak to the group, but she says no because they don’t want people to tell them how to live… they don’t want to be spoken to… they just want to hear stories.

Isn’t this true for all of us? We are tired of the noise, the rants, the tidily packaged life lessons, the three easy steps, and the secrets to success, yet we keep scrolling.

The internet has always been about connecting people through machines. Today, it feels like it’s more about machines connecting with machines.

I remember the wonder of internet bulletin boards and making friends with people from around the world. I remember the joy of my first proper email – sitting in an internet cafe in London in 1995, marveling that I could instantly send a message home to New Zealand, rather than have them wait two weeks for my postcard to arrive.

I remember the excitement of ICQ and being able to coordinate with friends at University about arranging to get together over lunch, and not just relying on a shared physical noticeboard where we would pin notes.

I remember how blogging opened up a world of possibilities and how much community was created. I remember running fan websites with forums and how those in-person meetups and friendships made will stick with me for life.

I remember discovering long-lost friends from high school on Facebook, when social networking lived up to its name, and the thrill of following breaking news on Twitter without needing to wait until the evening news told us what had happened.

Now it’s hard to know if a human or a machine wrote the content. Or if a human wrote machine-like content. Comment sections that were once full of discussion, humor, and debate have been drowned out by instructions to machines to send content to their inboxes. Our inboxes have become full of automated email sequences and DMs full of reels, rather than notes from friends.

It’s up to us to keep the internet about connecting people.

At the start of the year, I made a resolution to stop sending reels and focus on sending real messages instead. I’ve done pretty well with that, and only forgot and sent a couple of reels.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what togetherness means and how we can design better websites that help connect humans with humans so they don’t feel so alone in the world.

I’ll be sharing more about this in the next few weeks – if this sort of thing interests you, please let me know with a quick human reply saying so!

And, if you need website updates designed to help connect humans together better, please get in touch.