{"version": "1.0", "type": "rich", "title": "The more I interact with post-millennials the more convinced I am that the internet's (and society's) shift in the last decade...", "author_name": "kontextmaschine", "author_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "provider_name": "kontextmaschine", "provider_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "url": "https://kontextmaschine.com/post/185782394308/", "html": "

nostalgebraist:

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argumate:

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kontextmaschine:

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The 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.

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\u201cGrew up with a smartphone\u201d starting to seem as significant a distinction as \u201cgrew up with the internet\u201d was for us.

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yes totally, I mean it\u2019s 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\u2019t known any other world.

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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\u2019t a thing, if I was at a friend\u2019s house and wanted to check for replies to my latest post, I\u2019d have to ask to use their computer.

I was self-conscious about this being a dorky thing to do \u2014 my friends were extremely dorky themselves, but if anything that intensified the teenage crab-bucket atmosphere \u2014 and I tried to defuse the awkwardness by lampshading it: turning \u201cRob has to do his forum checks\u201d 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 \u201cforum check\u201d 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\u2019m surrounded by people doing \u201cforum checks\u201d whenever I\u2019m 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\u2019t be the image \u2014 forum checks literally all around me, now simply one of the default human activities.)

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