People take the internet far too seriously these days. That seems especially true of the generation that has emerged not knowing any other world, and occasionally I engage in mourning for them, whether merited or not. I grew up before the internet was even a glimmer in Al Gore’s eye. I came of age in a time when our main form of long-distance communication was still the phone, but the landline version: cords and rotary dial and all. My niece and nephew widen their eyes when they hear what we lacked then, but I’ve only ever been immensely grateful for having grown up in a world without cel phones or social media. In so many ways, that absolutely saved me – not only then, but now.
When so much of our lives are based off of and compared impossibly against that which we see on social media, the fragile identity of my youth would have broken under such intense attacks. My generation (Generation X, or Xennials according to some) had what some might consider the best of both worlds: the emerging technology of computers and the internet coupled with the knowledge and memory of a lifestyle without such intrusions. It’s becoming a lost generation, for better and worse, and I marvel at those who don’t know what it’s like to spend an entire Saturday without computer or phone or TikTok.
Growing up without such distractions allowed me to use and develop my imagination, and at the same time learn to appreciate and live in the quiet moments of downtime that seem to make so many people uncomfortable today. More than that, when the internet and its accompanying barrage of social media advanced, I was able to take it all with a grain of salt. It was, at first, a whimsical thing of novelty – a new form of communication – sterile and removed from the closer mechanism of phone calls or handwritten letters which had been my preferred mode of connection. As such, I never had to take it all that seriously. Since I wasn’t raised on it, I knew I could easily, and perhaps quite happily, survive without it. That’s made a world of difference when I see people getting so outrageously bent out of shape on FaceBook and Twitter and Instagram.
Not that I don’t get dragged down in the muck now and then – and not that I don’t take some of what I do here very seriously indeed – but I’ve lasted for all these online years by keeping things more or less light and breezy – knowing full well that so much of this isn’t real, even if it’s forever.
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