The paradoxe of participative web.

We once believed that the Internet would make us smarter, and people had great expectations about its future. It was supposed to become a place where people would share, interact, and learn from and with each other all around the globe.

In 2025, when the web is crowned under thousands of billions of tweets, videos, photos, articles, tutorials etc.., people tend to assume that it fulfills its promises. But did it?

We all spend so many hours on the internet every day, that I think it’s time to ask ourselves: what do I get out of all this time? What can I show that I can be proud of? Am I really a part of what I watch all day, or am I just a spectator of it?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not telling you that you should have bigger goals, and try to dictate how you should live your life. My point is just to highlight that most people out there are passive on the Internet, even if the main part doesn't think so. And that passivity might silently shape who you become.

Passivity is hard to detect

Not convinced? I respect that. Having a critical mind is crucial while navigating the internet and that shows that maybe you are not just consuming this blog. But the truth is that passivity is really hard to detect, mainly because of 3 reasons :

• Being passive can take different shapes
• It can hide itself behind fake productivity
• It feels really good to stay in

Let me explain what I mean when I talk about the different shapes of passivity.

1 - The cognitive passivity

That one is the main reason for this post.

Cognitive passivity is when you're technically “learning,” but without truly engaging with the knowledge or using it.

When it comes to learning online, I have two distinct behaviors. It all depends on the goal of what I learn. Is that a 42 or a personal project related ? Or is it just driven by curiosity ?

As a 42 student, I’m constantly learning online and spend hours and hours on blogs, videos, courses… But at the end of that, I am actively building something related to what I’m currently learning. It’s not just learning for the sake of learning (even if I respect that) or learning interesting things “just in case”.

That’s what makes all the difference. When I’m learning for my own pleasure, I rarely have a precise goal. I just know that I’m interested in topics like anthropology, neurology, boxing, African culture, or books in general. I will randomly go through different resources about them. Right at the moment, I learn new things for sure, but as they are not related to each other and I’m not actively using them, you can be sure that all of what I learned will be forgotten in less than a month (and I’m kind with my memory).

I guess you can relate to it. Do you really retain what you learn when you don’t build something with it or actively review it ? What can you teach me that you learn through that one video that you found so interesting a month ago ? About the book you finally read last year ?

The big mistake here is that we tend to take exposition to information for learning, giving us the illusion that we are cognitively active. But actually, that’s passivity.

2 - The creative passivity

Although learning for curiosity is a thing, most people, whether passively or actively, learn online for a reason. We all have something that we dream about making. Whether it’s to launch a YouTube channel, become a singer/musician, start that coding project or launch a business.

So we prepare for it, learn for it, dream about it… But never make it. And that is creative passivity.

The same applies to me with Nexus. I started thinking about it a year ago. So I learn about neuro-ergonomics, how we learn online, why UX is so important, and also made a lot of Figma mock-ups. All that stuff lasted an entire year, and in the end, I had absolutely nothing to show for it. I haven’t written a single line of code.

Here is the passage that makes me realizing it :

It hit so close to home that if he were talking to me directly, he wouldn’t have said anything different.

The big mistake here is that we tend to take that surface activity for real progress when we haven’t actually build a single thing. And actually, that’s passivity.

3 - Attention passivity

If you made it to the end of the Zuckerberg speech video, congrats — you just fell into the third form of passivity: the attention one.

I think that’s the most dangerous shape of passivity cause everyone is concerned, and it can