Dear reader,
A year has passed since I opened this site. I set myself the goal of writing one article per month, and I managed to do it. Consistency isn’t a virtue in itself, it can stiffen quickly. But being able to meet a deadline, even one you set for yourself, matters: that’s why I consider it a good sign that I kept the rhythm.
Reaching the first anniversary, I find myself closing the circle where I opened it. After twelve months of trial and error, I’m once again reflecting on the technical choices that shaped this space, just as I did in last January’s article.
In my first post, I explained why I chose to write in a technological landscape dominated by endless streams of short video content. Following McLuhan and Postman, I argued that the medium is the message: the tools we use to communicate exert a pressure that shapes the kind of content we express through them.
And when a medium dominates a particular technological age, its influence on content scales with its reach: when most people consume information through a single medium, its underlying logic starts to seep into public discourse, and from there into the culture that depends on it. Still guided by Postman, I arrived at the idea that audiovisual content tends to slide into entertainment, while the written word remains the medium best suited for sustained, rational discussion. That was the reasoning behind my choice to write in the age of TikTok.
Clearly, the internet is also a medium, and as such, it affects not only the content we share but also the way we think. I didn’t explore this aspect in my previous post, because choosing to publish online today is unavoidable, and I have no intention of stepping back from it. Over this past year, however, I’ve realized I should have thought about it more carefully: the internet shapes how we think and act, regardless of the form we give to what we produce. That means we need to be attentive and intentional, because what feels spontaneous may in fact be the medium whispering its preferences to us.
I’m referring in particular to publishing frequency. Constant connectivity creates a regime of overproduction that makes not only technical solutions necessary (such as search engines and discovery algorithms), but also conditions users to produce more and more, ever more often, just to avoid being submerged by the torrent of content published every second.
A high publishing frequency obviously works against depth. In a way, writing can be thought of as a form of knowledge compilation: the author lives, reads, studies, reflects, and eventually condenses what they’ve learned into a text that is dense and compact in informational terms. That takes time, and it becomes impossible when we need (or want) to write frequently. Anyone who publishes for a living in 2025 is forced into superficiality.
I had chosen to write monthly. My good fortune is that I’m not obliged to do so: this isn’t my job, and I can publish whenever I like. That rhythm felt spontaneous at the time; now I wonder how much of it truly was, and how much came from a sense of urgency that, as an everyday internet user, I had come to see as normal.
This year has taught me that a month isn’t enough for the kind of writing I aim for. I don’t want to add shallow content to an environment already brimming with it; I don’t want to amplify the noise. I would rather my texts be denser, the result of a longer path.
So I’ve decided to reduce my publishing frequency: no longer one text per month, but one per four-month cycle. The next one will appear on March 1st, 2026. This will give me time to read, study, talk to different people, gather more material to distill into something more substantial. And if that still isn’t enough, I’ll adjust again.
In the meantime, thank you for your attention. Reaching the end of a long text is increasingly unusual, and it suggests a kind of care for one’s own attention that the digital environment often erodes. Taking distance from social media habits helps, but the broader issue runs deeper: the structure of the internet itself pushes us toward speed, abundance, and constant availability. If we want to preserve our ability to follow meaningful ideas, we need to stay aware of how the medium shapes us, not just the content we choose.
Vale,
Davide