and so much faster. The access to information it provides is so amazing; I really wish it existed when I was young. The down side is that there is also an enormous amount of crap and deception, and social media is turning out to be detrimental in a lot of respects. We didn't have anything like it when I was a teenager, and that was probably a good thing, considering how toxic social relations could get even among small circles. There was a thing called a slam book, a spiral notebook that got passed around and the kids would write comments about other kids, and it got pretty poisonous and hurtful. Social media amplified the slam book exponentially, glad I never had to be a victim of that. People can be especially shitty when they can hide behind some form of anonymity, which might be the most serious consequence of the internet and social media. There are no filters and no effective fact-checking mechanisms and no consequences for saying whatever the hell you feel like saying. Valuable information is at your fingertips but so is the opportunity to be a total dick to someone you don't know just because you feel like it, or the victim of someone else you don't know who has taken the opportunity to be a total dick to you just because they feel like it.