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solarpsychedelicI hesitate to romanticize the Old Internet. I lived through enough flame wars.
Yet I think it was better for society and our collective mental health when we had to go through the following to use the internet:
- A computer that took a long time to boot up
- A dial up modem and waiting for the connection
- Static, portfolio type websites
- Long form blogs that were mostly text and functioned like newspaper columns or magazine articles
- An understanding that forums were a community
- And those forums were moderated (that’s necessary)
However, once someone gets convinced that they’re the main character and therefore entitled to attention, success, and money, and hand them a phone with apps…. Yeah, that’s the problem.
Just because a person takes a video of themselves yelling about something and posts it online does not make them an expert or a good source of information. Yet as a society we seem unable to understand this. Now our collective perception and understanding of how things work are so damn skewed.
I miss the internet that required effort, skill, patience, and an understanding of community. Once you had to wait to dial in, log in, wait for a site to load, etc., then the immediate reactions burn off simply through the sheer amount of work it took to get online.
Will there be a backlash against social media and smartphones? I’m not so sure. The millennials tried this already with the hipster movement. Created some nice things but the lifestyle got expensive.
This tech might be too baked into daily life at this point. But still, we have agency, and we can make choices to shift our behaviors to healthier activities.
Yet I think it was better for society and our collective mental health when we had to go through the following to use the internet:
- A computer that took a long time to boot up
- A dial up modem and waiting for the connection
- Static, portfolio type websites
- Long form blogs that were mostly text and functioned like newspaper columns or magazine articles
- An understanding that forums were a community
- And those forums were moderated (that’s necessary)
However, once someone gets convinced that they’re the main character and therefore entitled to attention, success, and money, and hand them a phone with apps…. Yeah, that’s the problem.
Just because a person takes a video of themselves yelling about something and posts it online does not make them an expert or a good source of information. Yet as a society we seem unable to understand this. Now our collective perception and understanding of how things work are so damn skewed.
I miss the internet that required effort, skill, patience, and an understanding of community. Once you had to wait to dial in, log in, wait for a site to load, etc., then the immediate reactions burn off simply through the sheer amount of work it took to get online.
Will there be a backlash against social media and smartphones? I’m not so sure. The millennials tried this already with the hipster movement. Created some nice things but the lifestyle got expensive.
This tech might be too baked into daily life at this point. But still, we have agency, and we can make choices to shift our behaviors to healthier activities.