Opinion | The Year the Millennials Handed the Internet Over to Zoomers - The New York T... - 0 views
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recently I find the task of wasting time online increasingly onerous. The websites I used to depend on have gotten worse, and it seems as if there’s nowhere else to look. Twitter has been transformed under new management into an increasingly untenable social experiment called X. Instagram is evolving into a somehow-even-lower-rent TikTok, while TikTok itself continues to baffle and alienate me.
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the main complaint I have heard is was put best, and most bluntly, in The New Yorker: “The Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore.”
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we’ve grown used to an internet whose form and culture was significantly shaped by and molded to our preferences. The American internet of the 2010s was an often stupid and almost always embarrassing internet — but it was a millennial internet. There were no social networks on which we felt uncomfortable; no culture developments we didn’t engender; no image macros we didn’t understand.
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There was a time in my life when it was trivial to sign up to a new social network and pick up its patterns and mores on the fly. Now, I feel exhausted by the prospect.
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millennials’ screen time has been on a steady decline for years. Only 42 percent of 30- to 49-year-olds say they’re online “almost constantly,” compared to 49 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds. We’re no longer the earliest adopters, even: 18- to 29-year-olds are more likely to have used ChatGPT than 30- to 49-year-olds — though maybe only because we’re no longer being assigned homework.
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The heaviest users and most engaged American audience on the internet are no longer millennials but our successors in Generation Z
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Frankly, that should be freeing. Being extremely online, on an internet geared to your interests (in the same way that heroin is geared to your brain), is not exactly a quality conducive to personal happiness
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I suspect there is another factor driving the alienation and discomfort felt by many of the people who feel as though the internet is dying before our eyes: We’re getting old.
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The celebrities are unrecognizable (Kai Cenat???); the slang is impenetrable (gyatt???); the formats are new (GRWM???). Austerely tasteful overhead shots of meticulously arranged food posted on Instagram have been replaced with garishly lit minute-long videos of elaborate restaurant meals posted on TikTok. Glibly chatty blog posts about the news have been replaced with videos of recording sessions for podcasts
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the creative expression and exuberant sociality that made the internet so “fun” to me a decade ago are booming among 20- somethings on TikTok, Instagram, Discord, Twitch and even X. “Skibidi Toilet,” “Fanum tax,” “the rizzler”
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True, the fun I’m talking about is co-opted and exploited by a small handful of powerful and wealthy platform businesses
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When you drill down, what mostly seems to have changed about the web over the last few years isn’t the structural dynamics but the cultural signifiers.
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Perhaps what frustrated, alienated and aging internet users like me are experiencing here is not only the fruits of an enjunkified internet but also the loss of the cognitive elasticity, sense of humor and copious amounts of free time necessary to navigate all that confusing junk nimbly and cheerfully.
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The more alienating the mass internet is to me, the more likely I will put to good use the hours I previously spent messing around
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Or, at least, the more likely it is I will find corners — group chats, message boards and elsewhere — geared to my specific interests rather than the general engagement bait that otherwise dominates.