For a while now, one question has been circling in my mind about how we inhabit digital ecosystems: from what stance do we speak? What position do we take when we participate, share, or interact in those spaces that, though seemingly weightless, increasingly shape our daily lives?
I often catch myself wondering: where does this almost uncontrollable urge to share everything that crosses my screen come from? Links, photos, videos, news, messages forwarded again and again—without really asking whether they make sense for the other person, whether they add anything to the group, whether they actually carry what I want to say. What lies behind this compulsion? A genuine desire for dialogue, or just the anxiety of not being left out of the endless stream of information?
What’s striking is how we complain about “digital noise,” about the flood of messages and notifications that wears us down—yet rarely do we stop to notice how much of that noise we ourselves generate. It’s not only “the networks” or “the algorithms”: we too are the ones feeding that whirlpool of stimuli. Which leads to another question: is it possible to inhabit a different kind of digital world, one where we pause for a second before hitting send, forward, or post—to ask ourselves if we’re fostering clarity and dialogue, or if we’re just clogging the channels?
At heart, it comes down to the role we want to play in the digital communities we’re part of. Do I want to be someone who nurtures a richer exchange, or do I, without realizing it, become just another source of clutter, saturation, informational fatigue?
The comparison with the physical world is inevitable. Because—even if we forget it—digital life is not separate from real life: it runs through it, reflects it, reshapes it. Of course, we don’t behave the same way in physical spaces as in virtual ones. You don’t walk into a deli and ask for a gallon of bleach. You don’t bump into a neighbor on the street and unload five breaking stories at once. But online, those boundaries dissolve. Suddenly everything seems permitted: sharing without filter, speaking without pause, flooding the conversation without listening.
That mismatch makes me think digital spaces encourage behaviors we’d never sustain face-to-face—and not always for the better. What would be absurd in person becomes normal when there’s a screen in between. Maybe in the process we stop recognizing the other as a subject, as a person, and treat them more like an inbox than an interlocutor.
So another question arises: do I really need to send this message—or am I just unloading on someone else the torrent of information overwhelming me? Am I sharing to converse, or because I can’t bear to keep it to myself?
These doubts confront me not only as a “victim” of others’ noise, but also as a “culprit” of reproducing it. Because I often do exactly what I criticize: compulsively forwarding, flooding chats with links, sending chains of messages that exhaust rather than build dialogue.
Seen through a communal lens, it’s clear that without minimal rules, chaos is inevitable. Take a simple example: in a group like Multiviral, if everyone posted freely without care or selection, the flow would collapse. In one day we might get 17 items about principles and values, 8 posts from a writer launching a book, 2 recycled videos on a topic already discussed… until the conversation is suffocated. A space meant for dialogue would morph into its opposite: a place where no one listens, where the overload of information buries any chance of creating something in common.
The paradox is that, while we celebrate digital spaces as places of encounter, we often forget we’re also responsible for sustaining them. And that means not just bringing content, but thinking about how we bring it, how we present it, what we hope to spark in others by sharing it. It’s not about an audience passively receiving whatever I throw in; it’s about opening the door for dialogue, reciprocity, collective construction.
And this leads me to something that unsettles me deeply: the automation of human behavior online. Because without awareness, without a pause before hitting “send,” we end up acting like automatons. And if we behave like automatons—how different are we from bots? The idea of a “bot-like humanity” sounds provocative, but I don’t think it’s far from reality: flesh-and-blood people, full of vitality, behaving in the digital ecosystem like pre-programmed software.
Think about it: artificial intelligence, which we talk about endlessly, may not need much effort to take over roles once exclusively human. Why? Because humans, in their digital form, have long been predictable. They cycle through the same three gestures: share, forward, forget. No memory built, no depth of dialogue, no pause to consider the effect of what’s being sent. In that automatic repetition, that lack of awareness, humans begin to mirror the machine.
And so the deeper question arises: what space do we leave for the human in digital ecosystems? What difference remains between the way we inhabit these spaces and the way a bot would?
What worries me is that, without awareness, the digital realm ends up fostering a kind of shared selfishness. Each person hurls their stream of messages without much thought for others. And yet, the paradox: we all claim to want the same thing—that groups work, that dialogue flows, that reciprocity circulates. We all complain about overload, about noise, about chaos. But how rarely do we see ourselves as part of the problem.
Aren’t we also responsible for the very saturation we feel victimized by?
When rules are absent—or when they exist but we ignore them—we break the basic pact of coexistence that makes a digital community something more than just another space. Ultimately, it’s not about prohibiting or restricting the circulation of ideas, but about building together a way of being online that respects the other, that safeguards attention, that fosters exchanges worth having.
Otherwise, we reinforce exactly what we most criticize: the relentless noise that corrodes the possibility of real dialogue. And then digital life ceases to be a meeting ground and becomes instead a space of shared solitude—where everyone shouts their message without hearing the one next door.
The question remains open: do we want to be humans who simulate to converse —or bots who forward?
Translator’s Note:
The original Spanish title “Sobre el reenviado nuestro de cada día” plays on the biblical phrase “el pan nuestro de cada día” (“our daily bread”), which in Spanish also functions as a colloquial expression meaning “something habitual, part of daily life.” By replacing “bread” with “forwarded”, the author ironically frames compulsive message-sharing as today’s daily sustenance. In English, while “our daily bread” retains its biblical resonance, it lacks the same everyday idiomatic use. Therefore, the translation “On Our Daily Forward” seeks to preserve both the biblical echo and the sense of routine, though the double layer of meaning is inevitably less transparent than in Spanish.
It is also worth to point out that the author hints at another layer of irony: even the automatic repetition of a prayer (“The Lord’s Prayer”… Our Father, who art in heaven…”), a request, any prayer, or a mantra,… Automation can empty it of meaning, force eroding what it once carried on the spiritual or intangible plane. In short: By Compulsive forwarding in the digital age: how our daily shares create digital noise, blur dialogue, and make us act more like bots than humans. Who are you online—a bot or a human?
