I swear we’ve already had this exact thread.
Yeah it is a hot topic, and one that deserves to be considered and reconsidered often, especially as the landscape continuously changes due to the fallout from its presence.
I am pushing 50. I spent the entirety of my adolescence without any kind of smart device/personal communication on-hand, never mind the Internet or modern social media of any sort. At the tail end of high school, medium-core nerds like myself may have been starting to investigate things like bulletin board services and the usenet and such.
In college, with a computer-centric major I started getting a lot more access to an online lifestyle (meaning, I got an email address and started spending time at a terminal, in a lab, etc). Late in college the graphical WWW was suddenly just "there," the media picked up on it and you started seeing the proliferation of web URLs in marketing everywhere. You could watch (very small, simple) videos on a PC, you could download MP3s and rom files, you could find 20 second clips of unbelievably grainy porn. "Normal"-ish people (meaning, some college students) started messaging on ICQ and even better, AIM. You started hearing about looking for jobs online, looking for apartments online, buying plane tix online. Typing addresses into Mapquest in order to print out directions to get somewhere that you didn't know (this.. was.. magical). I met a girl in a singles chatroom (5 minutes to refresh the page!) and EVERYBODY made fun of me. Meeting a girl on the Internet was taboo as fuck!
Moved far away to LA, finally got a cellphone since it made my life a billion times easier (finding a job, finding a place to live, etc). It spent the majority of its time in my glove box, I couldn't even send text messages on that thing. I remember the first time I saw someone send a text message internationally, it completely blew my mind.
A few years past all of this, the bomb went off. Friendster gave way to myspace, which gave way to Facebook. Android and iPhones suddenly became the hot item that everybody needed to feel like a fully functioning person in many aspects of society. You could be a slow adopter, but as more time passed if you weren't "connected" you were basically an alien, isolated, unreachable. All these things coalesced and morphed a tiny bit more, and now this has absolutely become the rule of the land. And I can easily say that we are still in a very early phase of changing/being changed by all of this.
Is it good, bad? It is both. It is progress, change, disruption. It feels a little insane to look back on the past, say, 15 years and chart what havok has been wrought across the spectrum (both good and bad). For me, a person steadily getting older, it's fascinating to have grown up alongside so much of this modern tech and seen it profoundly mutate and flourish since I was already a young adult active in the world. Now as I am getting up there I often grapple with these questions "is it good for us, does this make life better/happier? What does it mean for the future?" Impossible to say. Kind of... paralyzing, at times very depressing. There's still a lot of things to be excited about, but we've also peeled back a bunch of layers of our society with all of this and it's been both empowering and tremendously worrying (there's a lot of ripe hatred, confusion, all the usual -ism's which are alive and well).
So, I don't know. I wrote this long post because I wanted to really point out how that there was a time when all of this was just so exciting and it felt like the world was becoming more accessible, closer in such a good way. But as we've been seeing this progression there's also been a steady undercurrent of the darkness as well and ESPECIALLY with the big moves in society the last.. 6 or 7 years, or so, there's been a steady amount of things that are just moment-to-moment difficult to deal with. I suppose every generation has their things. For crying out loud we have people complaining about being depressed because they say something unsettling on reddit and how it is the end of their world, but our parents and grandparents had to grapple with literally living during world war times. So it is all relative, I guess.
I can keep ranting (clearly!) as this is a major topic that comes up and affects my life all the time. The point is I am so happy to have grown up "at the end" of the pre-smart phone and social media era, and been able to acclimate to it when I was a little older. I was happier as a young, innocent person than where I am at now and though the future is still EXTREMELY exciting, I feel like we've all been given a real taste of what to expect which might not be so wonderful. And so, I am wary. You should be as well.
