I sort of understand why saner times are so foreign to them. We're talking about people in their late teens or early 20s. They would have been around 10 give or take a few years when this shit kicked off, so they would have been a good half decade away from political awareness. I'm about the same age as you, and there was a discussion here not too long ago about Waco. Some of the older posters here were grown adults at the time and watched it happen so to speak. I pointed out that for guys our age it's pretty much historical.
But you're right, there is a major difference and the internet is the major cause. We were the last generation to have a childhood where the internet wasn't everywhere. Outside the dialup internet we had for a few years I didn't have access to home internet until I was 11 or 12. Before that (and even a number of years after that) parents were the main source of cultural information. Other kids too, but the other kids had their parents as their main source. So that was the connection. The proportion of cultural information kids got from their parents dropped dramatically when being online 24/7 became the norm. Memories are so short on the internet. It's easy to forget some trend or meme from last year, let alone stuff from decades ago. That's not the Faggitors' fault. What is their fault is their know it all attitudes and willful ignorance of the past.
The internet has so fundamentally changed too. It has changed from being a wild west of varied, diverse sites made by both individuals and corporations to a carefully curated and psychologically-engineered garden, accessible mainly through apps.
The internet feels less free overall. The world wide web made the internet accessible in a way that allowed the average person to explore a new world. But then start phones and app culture clamped that down, making everything a focus on what's trending or what the algorithm wants you to see.
Absolutely. I think that this site qualifies as old internet simply for not being mainstream and for not having an associated app.
But the old internet seems to be less populous than it used to be. A lot of online communities consolidated into larger sites, like Digg, Reddit and Tumblr. While all of those sites have issues, with Digg and Tumblr falling into obscurity and Reddit turning insane, I haven't seen evidence of a widespread exodus back to the old style of internet.
Even the right wing counterculture has fallen into this mentality. There was so much focus into making a right-wing Twitter clone. The same goes for YouTube, and even Reddit.
Go read David Stewart and Brian Neimeier's books on the subject. Anyone who wasn't at least tweenaged at the turn of the century has a vastly different outlook from even Gen X.
I sort of understand why saner times are so foreign to them. We're talking about people in their late teens or early 20s. They would have been around 10 give or take a few years when this shit kicked off, so they would have been a good half decade away from political awareness. I'm about the same age as you, and there was a discussion here not too long ago about Waco. Some of the older posters here were grown adults at the time and watched it happen so to speak. I pointed out that for guys our age it's pretty much historical.
But you're right, there is a major difference and the internet is the major cause. We were the last generation to have a childhood where the internet wasn't everywhere. Outside the dialup internet we had for a few years I didn't have access to home internet until I was 11 or 12. Before that (and even a number of years after that) parents were the main source of cultural information. Other kids too, but the other kids had their parents as their main source. So that was the connection. The proportion of cultural information kids got from their parents dropped dramatically when being online 24/7 became the norm. Memories are so short on the internet. It's easy to forget some trend or meme from last year, let alone stuff from decades ago. That's not the Faggitors' fault. What is their fault is their know it all attitudes and willful ignorance of the past.
We're the last generation to experience the internet in a way that let you not be exposed to it at all times.
The internet has so fundamentally changed too. It has changed from being a wild west of varied, diverse sites made by both individuals and corporations to a carefully curated and psychologically-engineered garden, accessible mainly through apps.
The internet feels less free overall. The world wide web made the internet accessible in a way that allowed the average person to explore a new world. But then start phones and app culture clamped that down, making everything a focus on what's trending or what the algorithm wants you to see.
It feels more like AOL won every day...
Absolutely. I think that this site qualifies as old internet simply for not being mainstream and for not having an associated app.
But the old internet seems to be less populous than it used to be. A lot of online communities consolidated into larger sites, like Digg, Reddit and Tumblr. While all of those sites have issues, with Digg and Tumblr falling into obscurity and Reddit turning insane, I haven't seen evidence of a widespread exodus back to the old style of internet.
Even the right wing counterculture has fallen into this mentality. There was so much focus into making a right-wing Twitter clone. The same goes for YouTube, and even Reddit.
Go read David Stewart and Brian Neimeier's books on the subject. Anyone who wasn't at least tweenaged at the turn of the century has a vastly different outlook from even Gen X.