It's been ongoing and accelerating for quite some time now. The Internet has revolutionized the world in ways that people can't really grasp unless they remember the Before Times, back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth and you had to look at a physical phone book to find numbers.
For those of us who do predate the Internet, watching its growth and evolution has been both fascinating and repulsive. In a time when the sum total of human knowledge is available in a device 99% of us are carrying around in our pockets, how is it possible that people seem dumber and even less informed than ever before? The phones got smart and the people got dumb.
I think we can lay a fair bit of the blame on social media, personally. At first things like Facebook seemed so neat and innocent. You could keep up with your dear old great auntie Gertrude and chat with her any old time you wanted. Social media promised an era of connection and togetherness and delivered something much less benign.
Instead we learned that these free platforms were harvesting our data and selling it to the highest bidder, reducing us to a collection of data points for marketers to comb through. Turns out we were the product all along for these "free" platforms.
Then there's the increasingly obvious detrimental mental health effects of social media. When I was a kid we were safe from the bullies once we got home. Now the bullying continues apace no matter where the target is and kids can indulge their most vicious impulses anonymously, tormenting their targets with no fear of accountability.
Social media enables and promotes narcissistic behavior. Why on earth does anyone think their followers give a damn about the burger they just ordered? Why, for that matter, does some random yutz even have thousands of followers? We've watched idiotic man-children and vapid, airheaded "influencers" build media empires with no actual recognizable skills. But they sure get rewarded with millions of dollars, don't they? Then we wonder why kids want to grow up to be influencers when previous generations wanted to be lawyers and firefighters and astronauts.
Sadly the social media genie is out of the bottle just like the AI genie is. I think we can only hope that AI isn't as corrosive to society as social media turned out to be. Regardless, it's just one more manifestation of the Internet and we're stuck with it now, like it or not.
And now I'm gonna step outside and yell at a passing cloud.
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