i wanted to just start writing as thats what this website is for. something i have been thinking about lately, inspired by reading about and talking to my friends about the dead internet theory. have a look at the threat linked if you don't know what i'm on about, as it's really interesting to think about. whilst i'm not sure how far i believe in it, i do thinks something is wrong with the internet.
i was born in the year 2000 and so do not remember a time before the internet. reading about life before the internet is really fascinating to me, and whenever i find a pocket reference book or relics of technology pre-internet, i am absolutely fascinated at how the world operated without it. call me a romantic gen-z or whatever, but i imagine life had so much depth before everything was so accessible. like life is a puzzle game and the internet is just a cheat code which removes so many layers of adventure you have to go through to find something out.
i really feel like i can see the pros and cons of the internet, having grown up on it. whilst it allowed me to meet people from around the world and develop new interests, it also isolated me and let me spend my childhood/teen years in my room, with the illusion of being connected. my earliest memories of being on the internet would probably be going to the local library with my younger sister and playing barbie and polly pocket games on the computers there, and then later on getting my own computer and my own club penguin account, but mostly using the computer for games, tuxpaint, editing movies filmed with friends, using word to make booklets printing out segments of the girls aloud wiki page with cute borders, and eventually discovering youtube and poring over fred, annoying orange, charlie the unicorn and other iconic videos that came out of youtube around 2010-time.
i remember my first ipod touch, as essentially a replacement of a nintendo, mostly using it for games. my first introduction to social media occurred with apps such as instagram, kik and whatsapp when i was ~11. i remember not having much to do on instagram because i didn't know anyone else on it, but i just posted random things, until a weirdo started perving on me. over time throughout the beginning of secondary school i remember more of my friends getting iphones/blackberries and social media apps, and the social life of a 12/13 year old started to revolve more around instagram and bbm. its funny thinking back to then, experiencing the rise of technology and platforms that now completely dominate social life, politics, news etc etc. but the platform that really sucked me in was tumblr. i won't talk about tumblr too much as i think it deserves its own post, but it was all encompassing. and this is where my negative experiences of the internet really started, with toxic fandoms, seeing things that influenced me to make bad decisions, all the stuff that comes with being on emo tumblr around 2012-2014. but skipping that, the world (or my world and what people at my school tended to be on) ended with most people being online for instagram, snapchat, maybe facebook but that was people older than us, youtube, and then from maybe 2018 i remember tiktok becoming a thing. what i find so bizarre is how many of my school memories revolve around being on or talking about things that happened online. like new relationships being announced via bbm broadcast or being left out of something and only knowing because you were on the private snapchat story. university is even more insane, because people go 'oh yeah someone i know was doing xyz with this other person' , when really they dont know the person, they just have them on instagram, and have never so much as had a conversation with them. i imagine my experience has been skewed heavily by the pandemic and essentially having a mostly online uni experience, but the world feels so much faker and shallower than those days before instagram gossip and clicking interested on fb events you won't really go to and finishing classes without having so much as uttered a single word out loud the whole semester. this brings me to my hypothesis
my aunt said something that i can't stop thinking about. 'people are weird these days' she said, and honestly i agree. it's hard to place, and i do hate falling into some weird sense of nostalgia for a time i never lived in. but it feels like people are so fake these days, are so unwilling to be friendly, only do things to say they've done them, make it out on social media that a party was so great or they're so close with this group of friends when you know in reality that they hate each other and the party was extremely boring, will only express themselves as long as it is in accordance with the current tiktok trends and follows a named aesthetic, will only care about issues people tell them to care about through an instagram infographic posted to a story etc etc etc. obviously not everybody is like this and not everybody is guilty of all of these things. but it seems more and more people have veered toward this purely aesthetic approach to life, and its fucking weird. that, plus the fact that people spend so much time doing absolutely nothing on the internet, and it now is used for a lot of the time as a way of procrastination or avoiding real social interaction. the fact that people in a group start to pull out phones, check snap maps for no apparent reason, and then put it away once theyve managed to avoid any interesting conversation, sit and scroll through tiktok for hours while ignoring texts from real friends, post birthday messages on fb timelines but avoid you if they see you in real life. or (and i'm directly calling people in my life out here since probably no one is actually reading this), the fact that at family/flat dinners or spending any quality time together, my dad as well as one of my flatmates can just sit and scroll through twitter/tumblr for the entire time drives me up the fucking wall. do people think the social interaction counts if they're mentally away with thousands of other random people arguing about football? its actually mind boggling and genuinely drives me mental. its gotten to the point where i dont know if the pros of phones making life easier with having a camera, music, maps, wallet etc all in one place are worth it if the cons are what feels to me sometimes like the disintegration of society and people's abilities to connect to each other. it got to a point where i got so mad at smartphones that i tried using a nokia brick just to get some peace, but found that i just felt left out. i've settled for keeping a smartphone but just getting rid of social media. but even with that i feel strangely out of the loop. like how i imagine in 90s films when kids go to summer camps and no one writes them letters so they don't know whats been happening. quote 'everyone' is always talking about some new tiktok trend, that i just feel so strangely out of the loop.
i'll probably rant some more soon but for now this is all i have time for. maybe i'll reformat this page soon