What's striking is that it seems to turn out to become a generational problem, at least in part, and also a matter of intelligence. Its going to create a new divide that is going to be within the same generation as well. Kids at school these days do learn forms of media literacy, and also regarding the internet. I'm just worried because schools generally trail reality by a half dozen years at least. They're not into the newest developments as they should be, I reckon and easily 'wowed' by something new. But still. The smart guys and girls will figure it out, and I think growing up with no reality other than one with internet, they will treat it more as a source of information much like we watched TV. Did that really brainwash us so badly? I spent a godawful number of hours in front of it... At the same time though... these smart guys still didn't figure out that the best path to sanity is simply staying far away from the service. Using it, is being used by it. That is also why I'm not a big fan of this jailbreak. I mean cool, we can hack it! But on principle you shouldn't even want to.
My observation with Gen Z is that they are becoming a lot more careful and skeptical when it comes to information. They don't believe what they read nearly as easily, because they know how to fact-check and it's kind of a 'cool' thing to do. They're disenfranchised with older generations, who have sort of let them down big time with the whole internet thing. They live in the inescapable aftermath of our follies and they hate it. Of course, a lot of them still buy into all of these "Web 3.0" institutions, but it also seems like when things go wrong, they're the first to criticize. And due to their natural affinity and skill with these platforms, they're really good at making things move. I think as time goes on they will shape how the internet works. The skepticism is on a gradual slope upwards. In my internet heyday, we were all partially riding that Web 2.0 high... it symbolized sort of a libertarian utopia, free from all of the laws and rules governing society. We love IoT with it's Silicon Valley sheen. We didn't want to acknowledge the risks, but we definitely saw them. As time went by, that all died anyway, as huge corporations moved in and took over. The dream is over. Things have changed. And now it's to a point where people are looking at revising the laws that provided that freedom, in order to keep these monolithic agents corrupting and monopolizing everything in check. Facebook is getting to be as big as the internet itself. These guys claim libertarian ideals, but only when it applies to them. Our freedom would get in their way. I don't think that's lost on as many people as before, when we thought they were more on our side.
I may just be projecting my own experience, though. I'm a millennial, but also a first generation internet kid. I was 8 when I first got exposed to it. There really wasn't much in the way of rules or understanding in 1998. I had free reign. I saw a lot of damaging stuff. I saw how crazy things could really be. By the time 2010 was here, I felt like I knew intuitively where we were going, and here at 2020, I don't think I was far off. So my hope is that as 'plugging-in' becomes increasingly more normalized, awareness across generations will go up. I can say, the newer generations at their age, seem to have a better grasp than I or my peers did at the same age. They're a lot more concerned with how interactions with and on the internet affect people, and talk about it all the time. They are very concerned with looking critically at how things should be done. It's a mix of utilitarian, deontological, and virtue morality. They're playing with the different methods and trying to find better outcomes. Some of it is hokey, but other times, things advance pretty quickly and overnight certain things don't fly anymore and get relegated to little corners where they fester and eventually implode. That's happening with political cloisters all over the net, now. It will not be sustainable. It's too much and people are emotionally exhausted. Heroin again. For a while, it feels amazing. But as tolerance builds you start to become sick and use just to feel normal, at which point all you want is to be off the ride. You keep coming back, but you resent it for that, and you resent yourself for sticking with it. That insight only requires adequate amounts of suffering in order to manifest.
The same thing sort of happened with TV, when you think about it. Generation by generation, perceptions shifted to the point where it became so toxic and not worthwhile that we lost interest. How many millenniasl watch TV anymore? How about Gen Z?
TV, to me, was a different, but similar creature. Its effect on psychology was there, but going back to the heroin analogy... if TV was heroin, internet is fentanyl. And it's not about the bad information, but rather its influence on how your brain works. It's everywhere, unlike TV. You can be just always interacting with it. It's been engineered to have a stronger effect than TV ever could. It can profoundly reshape how you process emotions and from there alter your whole decision-making process into something that hides your will from you and leads to choices not in your best interest. And then it feeds you the cure. To me, it's much more profound than say, TV, or video games. It's not the same conversation had by boomers and gen X regarding what they see as deleterious effects of video games and TV. Those effects are largely self-insulating. Whereas new media comparatively has no limits. It's much more potent in nearly every regard. Stronger drugs means not only stronger, less manageable side-effects, but new, unforeseen ones, as well.
That same divide exists in our current generation I think. There's a group of people that gets it, and can still use it and separate reason from internet reality - but even they are helping the market share to exist. There's a group of people that THINK they get it, but they're the sheep being led by the wolves, thinking they're not sheep but wolves themselves. And then there's a group that's agnostic. They'll believe everything - that group isn't new. They're the 'could be true, tell me more' type of people. Susceptible to deception in everything, and too kind-hearted, naive.
You hit on something big there. I think that was us, circa 2005. Older generations, I think might now be the most vulnerable in the sense that they are not as hardened to the effects, because it hasn't been in their world they way it has been in ours. They haven't been in it long enough to get severely burned. Funny how the tables have turned. When smartphones took off, these were the same people saying they were stunting us. Now they are the greatest example of how bad it can be, and more of us are just shaking our heads at the double-standard that is these generations getting swept-up in the same social media they claim is damaging our culture and society. They're the very poster children for the notion! I can personally say I want no part in any of this crap, but at the same time recognize that you can turn away from massive cultural shifts. To make them better, there have to be those who are willing to try to navigate the new, dangerous waters. But you're also quite apt in pointing out that simply by doing even that, you're feeding the toxic cycle. It sort of hard to picture what comes next. Though there's more of a push for accountability. Again, I really doubt that the current state of things is going to be sustainable for much longer. I think giants are cresting the hills they'll tumble down, and they won't be able to avoid it because they themselves are in a different, even more insular reality than the regular folk down below. They didn't see how things shifted, and it shows in how they handle everything. They're slowly digging their own graves, whilst still thinking they haven't been compromised in any way.
The problem with the internet though is that those groups mingle and social media algorithms go for the largest common denominator, ergo, some weird mix of utter stupidity and being misled. That's exactly the rhetoric you see in certain political camps. A blind faith coupled with an inability to reflect. Its like the religion of stupid. A horrible combination - there isn't even a holy book to 'interpret differently' - all bets are off.
That is the real monster. I try to be optimistic about it. Culturally we are reaching a turning point where increasingly more people are supremely pissed at the way this technology is manifesting and being used. I highly suspect a silent majority is simply distancing themselves. They still engage with the platforms (~70% of millennials are still on Facebook,) but to me that number doesn't say much about the qualities of that engagement, which I believe are fundamentally changing to those of fear and distrust. People are running out of corners to be complacent in. People are no longer joking when referencing dystopian sci-fi. The trades are not as good as they used to be. We see it and unplug. We keep more distance from social media. I don't deal with it at all anymore. And I feel better. That is a commonly talked about experience at this point. I think the louder minority most falling pray are the ones who lagged behind previously. They piled-in over the last 7 years, as we hit a point of exponential growth in engagement. The fallacy of that exponential growth was the idea that it could go on indefinitely, when anywhere in the universe, it tends to fall to entropy as resources cap-out. This iteration of the web is a bubble culture, waiting to pop. It was a given when integration hit that critical point where you would be socially excluded by not being involved in some way. Now, that is plateauing and new attitudes are taking hold... much more cynical ones. People are questioning if we really need this, or if it really does any good. I think the answer to both is 'yes' but these are tools that will take generations to learn how to use properly. Right now, we are witnessing another turning point in the development of them, like many before, going back to the 90's. The difference between then and now is that the internet isn't invisible and its effects on the real world are truly unavoidable, forcing people to face that, which is bringing a lot to the surface that was really always a problem.
This whole situation is really case in point, just another example among thousands of the push to 'break out' of the grasp of these companies and re-envision what they are as entities in the eyes of both the people and the law. Changes are a comin...
