I saw someone write that in five years’ time people will look at the state of the internet today and see it as ridiculous - an over-saturated hive of squabbling, hatred and chaos, where the substance is buried under seventy thousand layers of hysteria and bullshit (I’m paraphrasing).
I think that’s probably a little optimistic. When people make comments like that, it’s usually with some hidden knowledge that change is on the way, and there’s no reason why it would be. If anything, things are getting more chaotic. Pornhub isn’t just Pornhub, it’s the Pornhub network, with over a dozen different affiliated sites with next to no grounding principles. Anyone can set up a Tumblr account in about twenty seconds. Think about that for a second. There was a time when access to the internet was kind of age-restricted; if not by your parents then by the sites themselves. Eleven-year-olds masquerading as thirteen-year-olds were caught out (sometimes, at least). There are at least two people on this website violating the Tumblr terms of service because of their age. On my old blog, there were at least fifty.
Not that it’s just age. There are people my age who take having a blog as read. It’s not seen as adding to the noise anymore. Blogging becomes a so-called community that operates almost entirely outward. We say that blogs are personal records, that we’re just baring our soul and finding common ground along the way, but there’s an awareness of audience that comes with putting your thoughts on the internet. My best friend accuses me of coming across as inauthentic online, and while that’s not true, this isn’t (exactly) the way that I talk. For one, I slip into an American accent a lot and make dumb jokes. I’m not quite as depressing, and not every conversation I have is a stab at glib social commentary.
To say that we’ll look back and say that this was just the internet’s adolescence is odd, though. Sure - on the one hand, the constantly-connected people in their teens and twenties are going to grow up and hopefully mature a little, while still using the internet to a similar degree; there’s a distinct lack of loud, proud, middle-aged people speaking their minds at the moment. But then again, there will always be kids. There are people turning 13 this year who never saw the 20th century, and that terrifies me. I can barely remember a life without a computer as it is, and we got our first when I was eleven.
I feel like I’ve missed something - on the one hand, being online has brought me my fiancé, the potential to share books with people around the world, and to connect with people who have like-minded interests, but at the same time it’s brought a great deal of anxiety, depression and fear of missing out. I think I have barely enough knowledge of a life before all of this to figure out how to see being online as only a facet of my life, rather than just taking it for granted as wired into my psychology, but I know plenty of people my age who don’t, and a lot more only a year younger than me who definitely don’t.
That brings risks with it - the chief one being that when you feel anxiety related to sitting in front of a screen, because you don’t see the screen you ignore that it might be part of the problem. The presence of hate from anonymous individuals in your life is taken as read, utterly inescapable; I’ve encountered at least three people (all of whom I like) who, upon receiving unwanted anonymous attention, found it almost incomprehensible that they could just remove that anonymous attention with a couple of clicks.
It wasn’t that they didn’t know how; it was more to do with setting limits to that access. If you put a lock on your front door, after all, it keeps the smiling philanthropists out as well as the murderers. In real life, that’s a trade-off we accept because we don’t really like getting murdered. Online, where you’re only really likely to suffer hurt feelings, it’s (apparently) much harder to do.
The internet is a wide open space, with no limits unless we set them ourselves. In this browser, I have extensions like Tumblr Savior, which blocks any blog posts that talk about stuff that repulses me, Shut Up, which removes the vast majority of comments sections, a standard ad-blocker and an extension that changes “I have all the feels” to “Ａ ｓｗａｒｍ ｏｆ ｌｏｃｕｓｔｓ ｉｓ ｉｎ ｍｙ ｔｈｒｏａｔ”. Aside from that last one (which, for practical reasons, I only enable when I’m in a silly mood), they’re all because I need to set limits to my online experience to feel good about myself.
There’s this campaign in schools and colleges at the moment regarding internet safety, and it’s laughable how out of date it is. In the series of comics that come with the campaign, a girl is told “DON’T DO IT!” when she says she’s going to meet someone she met in a chat room - essentially, a concept that Tumblr actively promotes with its meetups and the reason I met Arden (and also others). Another person is advised to “report it” when they’re bullied online. Which is fucking stupid. There are no rules against bullying on the internet. We should be educating kids not to act irresponsibly or hatefully online in the first place, but there’s none of that. There are too many adults behaving irresponsibly or hatefully for kids to know better.
I’d say that we’re going to end up forging stronger boundaries between so-called communities online, but even there I’m not so sure - there will always be people who find it hard to negotiate boundaries on the internet (I’m definitely one of them, which is why lately I’ve been keeping out of using it socially almost altogether). There’s an awkward cycle of renegotiation, maybe, that I can’t see us breaking out of, and rather than it just being part of everyday life it’s going to become an irreplaceable part of everyday life. I’m just glad I got in at a time when I could - at my worst - tune it all out.