The more I interact with post-millennials the more convinced I am that the internet's (and society's) shift in the last decade...
The more I interact with post-millennials the more convinced I am that the internet’s (and society’s) shift in the last decade hasn’t been about “social media” but about smartphones, that the internet isn’t even a place you go anymore but something omnipresent everyone takes with them, so there’s no experience you have in isolation cut off from the akasha.
“Grew up with a smartphone” starting to seem as significant a distinction as “grew up with the internet” was for us.
yes totally, I mean it’s a cliche that everyone is on their phones all the time and yet still everyone is on their phones all the fucking time and some people haven’t known any other world.
Occasionally I think about this in connection with an otherwise trivial memory from my adolescence.
I was on a few video game-related Internet forums as a teenager in the early-to-mid 2000s, and I was pretty heavily involved in them, but none of my IRL friends had ever been on anything like them. Since smartphones weren’t a thing, if I was at a friend’s house and wanted to check for replies to my latest post, I’d have to ask to use their computer.
I was self-conscious about this being a dorky thing to do — my friends were extremely dorky themselves, but if anything that intensified the teenage crab-bucket atmosphere — and I tried to defuse the awkwardness by lampshading it: turning “Rob has to do his forum checks” into a self-deprecating injoke as though it were some embarrassing addiction I suffered from. This was successful as far as it went, and for a time “forum check” became one of those meme-like phrases that automatically qualifies as a bit of mildly funny, mocking banter whenever anyone says it, even outside of anything otherwise resembling a joke.
Anyway, every once in a while I remember this, and think about how I’m surrounded by people doing “forum checks” whenever I’m in public, on buses, in stations and lobbies, in the middle of the sidewalk, everywhere. (This is about the mainstream rise of social media and not just smartphones, but without the smartphones there wouldn’t be the image — forum checks literally all around me, now simply one of the default human activities.)