\n\n\n\n\n\nThe more I interact with post-millennials the more convinced I am that the internet\u2019s (and society\u2019s) shift in the last decade hasn\u2019t been about \u201csocial media\u201d but about smartphones, that the internet isn\u2019t even a place you go anymore but something omnipresent everyone takes with them, so there\u2019s no experience you have in isolation cut off from the akasha.
\n\u201cGrew up with a smartphone\u201d starting to seem as significant a distinction as \u201cgrew up with the internet\u201d was for us.
\nI remember calling this like 8 years ago at a family Christmas party, all the old folks were reminiscing about the society-changing effects of b&w television/cable television/home computers according to their particular generation and someone wondered aloud what the next technology was going to be and I said exactly this
\nThe iPhone came out in 2007 and the iPad was 2010, obviously it took a couple of years for either of those things to reach a mass market but pretty much from the beginning I remember looking at small kids using touchscreens and thinking how they already had more facility with them than I ever would, damn childhood neuroplasticity. Same thing my dad (who was an internet early adopter) must have felt watching my brother and I navigate early 2000s dial-up
\n
But it’s not like “knowing how to use the technology” \u2013 they aren’t editing autoexec.bat or resource forks or even TCP/IP settings or the equivalent \u2013 it’s about natively thriving in a society that’s always everywhere connected
Like if I’ve lately been hammering on “hot girls under 24 take ‘semipro sex worker’ as the structuring idiom of their experimental phases”, it’s not just, as one anon put it, the kontextmaschine indirect way of being horny on main.
I’m talking to these Tinder girls and following through to their instagrams, and LA has always selected for a type, but it’s like holy shit, since puberty you’ve had an internet-connected, video-enabled handheld pornograph on you all the time, you used the scenes coming out of that as your primary community growing up, you have literally never developed a sexuality that wasn’t openly market-tested for appeal to the male gaze for transactional purposes
Which no skin off my back but is exactly what the 70s “do you know where your children are” types, the 80s second-wave radfems and the 90s family values types were afraid of.
"}