When I was growing up the internet was a place to be liberated from the world say what you want to say, be whoever you want and form genuine communities with shared interests. Now the internet feels like a tool to enslave the mind with identity echo chambers and any deviation leads you to being banned and blocked shunned and silenced within a void that is inescapable. Novel unique websites coded manually by hobbyists running servers for free in the commons allowing people access to the free flow of information under the banner of “information should be free” has largely gone away with corpratisation. I miss the days when the internet was populated largely by nerds aiming to make a better world not this controlled censored hell hole of profiteering.
I can agree with that, if you examine it all it is are people’s ego responding to pixels on a device which they own, they expect a self reflection of their own ego hence when online discourse is terrible because we are all bombarded with information with people seeing different information and not understanding where that conclusion came from. It’s no surprise that the rate of narcissism has climbed with the rise of the internet as well as increasing polarisation, people aren’t self reflecting on why they react the way they do. I know this because over the years I self examined on why I react to what I was exposed to.
we don’t give ourselves time to reflect, yeah… everybody is mentally exhausted from it. constantly listening to someone talk directly into their ears… doesn’t matter what… you’re not allowing your mind to rest and reflect like it needs to… so everyone is sort of stuck on broadcast at the moment… immediately announcing their profile characteristics when you meet them… making sure you know their boundaries…
These days you get accused of trolling for having a discussion, your positions and solutions are assumed to generalised pre-perscribed ideological positions, you are given death threats, harassed and given abuse for deviating from the norm. Honestly the internet could do with being turned off for a month.
i’d make you all sit quietly in a corner for a week, if i could
Why? I thought we was having a decent civil conversation.
just my natural inclination, don’t take it personally… see this is the problem…
Explain your rational please
no… live with it or leave it alone… i don’t answer to you… it is what it is…
But why put me in a corner particularly?
If you have to start a statement with “these days” you don’t exactly have a strong position.
Couple that with 24/7 connection to the internet and smart phones etc. It’s a recipe for disaster. Back in the dial up days these were not issues you logged on updated yourself with the latest forum etc and you turned it off. There were serious forums and what can be called these days as shit post forums. The discourse was much more civil and friendlier than today’s standard. Everyone was anonymous and you was considered stupid for putting your personal information on the internet. Nowadays you get accused of trolling for having a different opinion, you get cancelled for wrong think and your life destroyed for not stepping in lock step, this kind of stuff was unthinkable in those days as it sounds straight from a nightmare dystopian novel depicting an extreme 1984 fascist society. The ethos around the internet was seen as a decentralised utopian world to free ourselves from the complex reality of our world, then the Normie’s came online.
Couple that with 24/7 connection to the internet and smart phones etc. It’s a recipe for disaster. Back in the dial up days these were not issues you logged on updated yourself with the latest forum etc and you turned it off. There were serious forums and what can be called these days as shit post forums. The discourse was much more civil and friendlier than today’s standard. Everyone was anonymous and you was considered stupid for putting your personal information on the internet.