technology
culture
Was the web a better place before social media?
The Saturday Evening Post
Sonya Supposedly
0
0
Genesis
Response
Penultimate
Finale
April 21st, 2021
As soon as I figured out that you could talk to other people online, I was hooked. This discovery came at the tender age of, oh, 11. Maybe 12. Definitely on the tantalizing cusp between childhood and puberty, already too eager to grow up for my own good, as my mom has long told me — though for many years I didn't believe her.
It was around 2005. I was a budding young thing, angsty but idealistic, straining at the bit to plunge into this chaotic new realm, with my instincts for navigating its turmoil as yet completely undeveloped. Compared to most of my millennial cohort, I was late to the internet. My parents didn't let me watch much TV, nor play video games. Yet their bookshelves were well-stocked and wide open. So I was sheltered, but moderately.
Once I realized that I could learn about fellow human beings online — plus get their attention directly! — I became utterly obsessed. "How do people even work" is a perennial puzzlement of mine. Fittingly, that recursive curiosity is in itself a hallmark of our species 😎
Navel-gazing might be the foundation of all great culture. "Know thyself," the oracle keened in those days of yore, her spirit serving as Apollo's tongue. Much like his sister Athena hammering her way out of Zeus' head, the message emerged from my own subconscious as a passionate imperative.
I started out shitposting (a term I wouldn't learn till much later) and reading slash fics, of all things, on the Neopets writing forum, of all places. Soon I progressed to DeviantArt and Facebook, then Tumblr. Eventually I stumbled onto Twitter — perhaps after you'd left, Bob.
Well over a decade since my digital debut, Twitter is where I usually hang out. But I also frequent Reddit, popular tech forum Hacker News, and a few other less well-known venues.
When I first got online, I found that voracious, voyeuristic lurking was equally captivating to active conversation, and certainly less work, so it consumed quite a bit of my time and attention. For better and for worse, "surfing the web" has become a lifetime habit — and as you noted, Bob, that means something different to my generation than it does to internet OGs.
Today my various social feeds are part of my "exocortex": cognition conducted out in the environment, by the environment, in this case communally, then transmitted back to the individual command centers in everybody's skulls. I came of age with a cybernetic self. As a cybernetic self. My parents were able to shield me for a time, but I caught up fast. This is my default.
I inhale the fresh reams of posts, thrilled to peek into people's lives, their yearnings and fears, mundane observations, ludicrous expectations, and — despite it all, despite the Sisyphean drudgery of samsara — their sublime dreams. Sure, it drives me crazy, but as I tweeted in 2020, "gotta be at least a lil bit crazy to be sane" 😉
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