the modern age (welcome to the internet)
Now, I'm no 'phone bad book good' kinda bitch, don't get me wrong.
Except, I'm also not blind. My generation is the first to grow up without ever having lacked access to the internet. We never had a chance to form ourselves without it really. Parents didn't know to keep their children off it and we absorbed everything thrown at us so easy.
The reason for our short attention spans is one we are all aware of but continue to indulge and adore things like Tiktok and the million and one variations that every other app creates, we understand that the anonimity allows people to hide themselves and yet we do nothing to stop the kind of cruelty that pops up online, the reason we all take a step further back from reality with every major world event only knowing to engage with it as if its another fandom event. Cowards, creeps, ghouls and freaks of all kinds hide behind default images; burner accounts instead of burner phones.
Personally? I think the internet is our greatest invention and will almost certainly be the beginning of the end. I think that humanity is too awful for its own good, that we don't allow the good to outweigh the bad for long because it is within our nature to be selfish. To do what's easy, what's simple and a lot of the time that means following urges that are a click away rather than take time to reflect on yourself at all. It's why the internet has a new celebrity or random person they've put a target onto every week; distraction and an inability to admit maybe you're not entierly in the right.
Canceling was meant to be a tool to purge the internet of the well and truly corrupt and we use it for kicks because we find someone 'cringe' now. It has removed any and all weight to the concept, allowing these people to return after evena few weeks because the collective conciousness has already moved on by then. We're not trying to improve things, we're revelling in our own goodness and overlooking any of the actual issues at hand. The amount of people who I'm sure have made hate posts or jumped onto the trend of hating someone without ever even verifying why the hate is there to start with is staggering. It's startlingly obvious in many cases such as Shane Dawson having literal hours worth of evidence that should more than qualify him as one who shouldn't have a following and yet he returns after a few months no problem. Why? Because as I've said our attention spans have shrunk infinitely, our goal isn't improvement but self congratulation. Therein lies the issue.
We have moved in a polar opposite direction in our efforts of progression. Now, it's become the acceptable thing to ask the general populace what you're allowed to think and feel. Accusations of racism for acknowledging your own race, white masses then shaming you for saying things of your own experiences despite all logic and them for certain not knowing better than you who holds the experience. This 'woke' culture that ultimately never bothers to scratch beyond surface level and educate themselves. It seems that the concept of thinking, learning, feeling for yourself is one of the past.
I deleted Twitter sometime ago now, making it the first time I'd gone without one of those major social media platforms and i must say I have never felt better about opening my phone. I steer clear of Instagram aside from the friends i have notifications set for (and posting my photos in a sort of photo diary) and TikTok is... well, an indulgence but one I'm cautious about more than I was. I don't necessarily think the absence of social media is the correct thing, don't get me wrong. I think that it's a wonderful tool that allows a kind of communication unlike anything else. I remember over quarantine the kind of environment that TikTok was was one I genuinely loved. We had a rare, small window of unity. One where we weren't so hung up on anything but working through this new experience together. I'm just quite tired of seeing a post pop up on my fyp of a pretty girl wearing something nice and then opening the comments to see people make fun of her relentlessly for nothing other than... being.
We tell on one another, we monitor one anothers behaviour and it's all for what? I remember someone posting a video of a couple simply enjoying one anothers company on Tiktok and the couple -who weren't even the ones who posted this mind you- being torn to shreds in the comments for quite literally nothing other than enjoying one anothers company. I think that some hard self reflection is always infinitely beneficial, and I know I am literally incapable of not reflecting upon myself and my behaviours so I suppose it's just very difficult to wrap my head around the behaviours of others who could know better if they just stopped and thought about their words for even a moment.
Bo Burnham puts all of what I'm trying to say here quite well and less gloomily (which is my specialty, as you can likely tell) in his special Inside. Welcome to the Internet, which ironically blew up on TikTok, perfectally draws your attention to all of this:
"We set our sights and spent our nights
Waiting
For you
You
Insatiable you
Mommy let you use her iPad
You were barely two
And it did all the things
We designed it to do
Now look at you
Oh
Look at you
You, you
Unstoppable, watchable
Your time is now
Your inside's out
Honey, how you grew
And if we stick together
Who knows what we'll do
It was always the plan
To put the world in your hand
Could I interest you in everything
All of the time
A bit of everything
All of the time
Apathy's a tragedy
And boredom is a crime
Anything and everything
All of the time"
If you truly have a little of everything all of the time, you lose a lot of drive to do anything at all. If you truly have complete anonimity then you can be as big a dick to random people, children online and never have to see the consequences to your words or actions. If you're hidden behind a screen and not looking anybody in the face you can say anything and everything at all. Isn't that precisely what I'm doing? Yes and no!
I think that what I'd maintain as a guideline to the internet is to just never state anything you wouldn't to someone you'd struck a conversation up with at a bus stop. Details kept vague, no space to hurt offered. Keep the sensitive bits close to your chest, but share as much as you think is worth sharing. As much as the words have near lost meaning; we have to be kind. If we aren't, I strongly suspect that last remaining appealing factors of what it is to be human will slowly drain from us in coming years until there's just... nothing of us left.
I'm watching our removal from reality grow worse already with the whole Johnny Depp case, even. We're distractible, we jump from thing to thing and we find it very easy to treat anything at all as we've learnt to engage with it on the internet. The edits sickened me at times, the choosing sides was insane in the way it happened. It's not picking between fucking team Edward or team Jacob, it's not your fave characters crazy character arc or some shit it's real life. I admittedly know very little of the case itself and it's because I was nauseated by the way that my peers online seemed to be engaging with it.
This is the real thing. This is not a drill.
I say all this knowing no better than anybody else, I'm aware. I say all this simply as one of the many who recognizes the trend and what we're doing to ourselves. I simply hope that this whole thing doesn't fall upon deaf ears if anybody does read it through. Understand that this isn't a judgement, as if you're reading this then we are equals in our engagement with cyberspace here. I simply plead that you be aware of yourself and your actions. Aware that your words hold weight, aware that it's so very easy to extend a hand rather than to slap one away.
I feel like an anime (that's one of my personal favorites) that communicates some of this rather well, Serial Experiments Lain, is always worth bringing up in this conversation. A brilliant show from 1998 that tells the story of a young girl named Lain who starts to lose her ability to tell the difference between her reality and the Wired, the shows version of the internet. It is more than worth a watch and with it being only about a 13 episode run there's no reason not to check it out so do yourself a favour and do so.
Here's an article that talks about the themes of Serial Experiments Lain and how they relate to the modern age of the internet better than I can. I highly recommend that you check the anime out and read the article, I think both are incredibly eye opening and an eerie reflection of our current state of affairs, especially for the show having been made back when computers were fucking clunky huge beasts:
https://the-artifice.com/serial-experiments-lain/
Comments
Post a Comment