I am an internet kid

on why social media isn't that bad.

I’m a 97’ baby. I grew up in Total Girl chatrooms, Club Penguin, playing Sims 2, talking to my crush on MSN after school, and sitting in front of the TV every afternoon without fail from 4-7pm to watch the best cartoons. I got Bebo in grade five, Facebook in grade six, and yes, my mother was not happy I was on either of them but how was she supposed to know when she wasn’t in the computer room watching over my shoulder? The internet, even in 2007 and 2008, was still a taboo place for a kid to hang out online, and posting pictures of yourself (my prime selfie era must have been from ages 10 to 13) was considered unsafe by adults and certainly talking to strangers online was a big no-no.

I remember reading a Dolly (or potentially Girlfriend) magazine article on which social media was best — Facebook, Myspace… and Friendster? I can’t even remember the third one which must of dropped off the radar completely, and MySpace obviously died very shortly after. These were the innocent days of social media, a place you would use to message people you already saw regularly, to post obnoxious things on your best friend’s wall, to do “tbh videos” and “rate me” posts, where updating your status with lyrics from Train was perfectly acceptable and an efficient way to let everyone know you’re in your #depressedera.

Gen Z is technically defined from 1997 to 2012, making me one the eldest members on the cusp separating millennials. Personally, I think there are mini-generations within these larger swathes of people grouped into broader-generations. At least I can claim that I was born before 2000 — anyone born afterwards, who are now turning 23 this year, just feels plain wrong. No! You are still meant to be in high school and just a kid! Says me, born a mere three years prior which hardly makes any difference at all.

Contrary to popular assumptions about Gen Z, which primarily relates to those born in later years, I had a childhood that was primarily off social media. Or, to be more accurate, considering I did get Facebook at age 10, social media was nothing like it is now used today. There were no influencers or full-time content creators and it was not a lucrative cash-bag yet to large corporations. It was less aspirational, and less about metrics, likes, and social clout. It was also a lot less visually oriented and desirable “aesthetics” were not yet established (it was more just awkward YouTube skits like “How to be Emo” or “Drunk Makeup Tutorials”). Instagram and Snapchat wasn’t a thing until I was in the last few years of high school. I would mostly post pictures of my sneakers or food and I rarely would scroll on there, if ever. Once you were caught up on your chronological timeline, it was easy to put your phone (or iPod touch) away.

Media panics have always existed. Books were once considered a threat to society in the 18th century, with reports circulating calling it an “epidemic of reading”, hard to believe today when reading is now considered an intellectually and morally superior pursuit to being online. We have since had the same moral panic each time a new technology or medium emerges, from radio, to television, video games, and now it seems, the internet, and subsequently, social media.

It is a universal question, at least when it comes to media theory, whether we are shaped by technology or technology shapes us. Have we become more vapid, narcissistic, but also isolated and lonely, because of how prominently we use social media? Or, was this already happening and the rise of the internet has only exacerbated it? In a world of shrinking attention spans, doom scrolling, and spending our lives chronically online, it is easy to assume that the internet is to blame. It is easy to assume this is the demise of humanity, that we are in fact, devolving, hunched over a phone or laptop, staring endlessly into a blue screen forever until our eyes turn into permanent squares. 

The natural reaction to changing times is to romanticise the past — “oh, remember the days before smart phones and laptops and you had to call people on landlines and show up to places if you agreed that you were going to be there? Wasn’t it better when children spent more time outside instead of glued to iPads? Weren’t we more socially adept pre-saturation of social media? Wasn’t it just infinitely better to live in an analogue age?” 

Yes Boomer, wouldn’t we all like to go back to the 60s and fuck in the mud at Woodstock. But lamenting about how we need to return to times gone past isn’t going to change the fact these are the times we’re in. There is no going back to a society pre-internet or social media. Instead, we need to learn how to grapple with a world which increasingly blurs the boundaries of the online with the offline. Our digital selves are now just as much a part who we think we are than the physical meat package we were born into. This isn’t something to be either celebrated or demonised; the only thing we can conclude is that things are different. “May you live in interesting times” is the most applicable statement to the 21st century thus far.

~

My algorithm on YouTube is continuously feeding me video suggestions like “I quit social media and I’m never looking back!” It knows where to push my buttons. My relationship to social media has swung back and forth like a pendulum over the years, deleting it entirely for a year in 2018/2019, after friendship drama and cryptic IG captions led to me to deactivating my account in an emotional haste.

But I digress. That year spent primarily offline taught me how to be present in the moment without capturing it. It taught me how to sit uncomfortably at the bar waiting for my date to return from the bathroom and not unconsciously open my phone as to not look like a freak staring out into space. It taught me how little you really miss out when you are not constantly plugged into the loop. And yet, whilst I enjoyed relative peace of mind, I eventually came back online.

I usually sit in the camp of “social media is bad and toxic” and spending less time on there is generally good for anyone’s mental health. I have constantly dreamt of returning to an old Nokia brick, throwing my iPhone off a cliff once and for all, living a life off the grid as much as humanly possible.

Yet recently, something shifted. My relationship to social media is mutating. Perhaps these subtle shifts are really just a function of my internal landscape changing at the same time, exiting out of a generally dark period and into one that feels (almost) hopeful. Gabi Abrāo definitely had something to do with it. Maybe I have been living under a rock because I no idea who she was, until my roommate handed me her book to read for inspiration and ideas of my own. She writes about using social media as “your grand notepad”, a place to scribble down your notes like you would in a journal. It doesn’t have to be such a serious and heavy thing; it can be used lightheartedly.

Isn’t that what the internet once was for me, perhaps for all of us? A place to write down some of my thoughts and maybe someone will read them, but also maybe not. Exposure and popularity was never the point. The point was it was fun and I enjoy writing and felt a compulsion to create and share and self-express. That was really the only reason I got Instagram back after my hiatus — there was still a need to have somewhere on the internet to practise using my voice.

It’s easy to forget how new social media truly really is. Our naivety has worn off and we now tend to concentrate on the negative consequences it has had on society. But when you take a step back and look at the positives: we are now interconnected through the global online village; we can connect with people we never would have been able to before. Were it not for the power of the internet, I wouldn’t have 90% of the friends I have today. Were it not for the power of the internet, I wouldn’t be able to publish my writing freely without going through a professional media organisation first (if it were accepted at all). Were it not for the power of the internet, I would not have access to the abundance of art and creativity shared by individuals who never would have made it commercially to the mainstream.

Social media is not permanent. It appears so ubiquitous that it is almost impossible to imagine a world without it. Even over the short time frame it has been around, it has already experienced several different phases of how it’s being used and consumed. But that does not mean it will be around forever. Neither, by the way, will the internet. And I know how sci-fi this all sounds and now you’re likely categorising me as a conspiracy theorist. Obviously, I don’t know how history will unfold.

But consider this: civilisations have risen and fallen, technologies have come and gone, species have lived and become extinct. Since we are incredibly limited in our ability to view time on a scale which stretches beyond our own lifespan, we cannot see that evolution happens in real time. It’s not like we ever reached a point of homeostasis and that was it; life continues to move and the external conditions continue to change. There is nothing you can ever take for granted as permanent. This applies both on a micro and macro scale.

What I’m trying to say is — shouldn’t we enjoy the internet for what it is? Shouldn’t we embrace social media for everything it brings us? So what if we’re terminally online? So what if we now exist in a hyperreality where the real and “unreal” are intertwined? Isn’t this the point?

The mind is always going to measure something as good versus bad. It wants to assert moral judgments and weigh up whether something is right or justifiably wrong. But maybe this just what’s happening. Maybe it sits on neither end of the binary. Social media can be the devils butter or a gift sent from god. And it doesn’t matter which end of the spectrum you reside on. Love it, hate it — the internet and social media is just a part of our evolution as a species.

~

This is the luckiest time to be alive in history. It doesn’t seem like it because the media constantly feeds us a stream of how everything is going to shit. Yes, there are terrible atrocities happening in the world today. There is an enormously inequitable distribution of global wealth. The arctic is melting and the temperatures are rising. I am not negating the very real problems which exist and affect billions of people.

But overall? The Cross of Planning has significantly improved our quality of life across the board. This global cycle brought the development of hospitals and regulated medicine practices, a standardised educational system, government institutional structures to take care of city planning — these are what have allowed huge communities of people to flourish. The internet could have never emerged in any other age without the global infrastructure to support it.

Arguably, evolution is inevitable and we have no choice in the direction it takes. All of history has been moving us towards this moment, to this point where we have access to almost everything we could ever imagine at the tips of our fingers typing into a Google search bar.

This is the digital information age; a time of abundance and chaos and everything happening all at once. The law of mutation states that when something new enters into the collective, it will always begin with confusion and disorder. The internet is barely 30 years old. Social media is not even a teenager yet. We are still adjusting to what is an astronomical change in the way we live our lives, how we work, the patterns of socialising and interacting with others.

I see the digital age (and social media) as emblematic of the transition into the new cycle, an era that will be ruled by Sixth Line selfishness. An era that has everything to do with individual empowerment of the spirit and being an example of oneself. The rise of influencers and the “micro-celebrity” are really just unique individuals role-modelling how they live their lives, displaying their own individuality and sense of “authenticity”. Platforms such as TikTok and Instagram are mediums which encourage such practises, even if it’s highly curated and performed.

Maybe, spending all day on your phone or computer isn’t such a bad thing. When you sit on the train and everyone is staring down at a device, maybe this is just the current way humans spend their time. At one point, we all had our faces buried in newspapers. What exactly is the difference? We’ve always had and needed distractions. In the future, they will look back on this time period and be fascinated by how engrossed we were with these strange machines made of metals and plastics, and it will seem weird and outdated. Maybe even cute.

There is a scene from the show the White Lotus which has stuck with me over the last several months. Funny, how such an off-hand remark made by one of the “villains” resonated so deeply to be true.

Basically, as Portia is complaining about how the world is a terrible place and how could you possibly be happy or satisfied when everything seems to be falling apart, Jack, responds with this:

“You’d rather live in the Middle Ages then, would ya? When they were ripping each other to shreds, yeah? They were way worse than ISIS or any of them lot. It’s a fucking miracle anyone’s even left in Europe. What we’ve been doing is just fucking hacking each other to bits and burning each other at the stake… 

What I’m saying is, right, we’re fucking lucky, d’you know what I mean? We’re living in the best time in the history of the world—on the best fucking planet. If you can’t be satisfied living now, here, you’re never gonna be satisfied.”

—Jack, in White Lotus 2

We are incredibly lucky to have the internet and social media at all. If you told someone 100 years ago about what society would look like today, about the sheer volume of information anyone has access to, the fact that distance nor speed is no longer an obstacle when it comes to telecommunications, they would be flabbergasted and impressed. And then likely pissed off about how we’re complaining about it.

Of course, we all have our own relationships to these platforms and have to navigate to what degree they serve us personally. For some people, that might mean staying off them altogether. For others, it might mean using them generously because they allow us to share our art and express ourselves creatively. Or perhaps, you sit somewhere in the middle, like myself, where you go through periods of total abstinence and others where you’re frequently engaged.

Neither is better or worse. Neither is morally superior. If you enjoy social media, don’t feel guilty about it. If you hate social media, great, log off. I am enjoying this season of my life where I am able to use Instagram with a new sense of objectivity and detachment, simply a place to share my work I am proud of. As long as I keep enjoying it, I will continue to be here.