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< Death of the Internet (or not?)
Howdy.
~bartender? A hot chocolate and a jar of water, please.
I have seen "the internet" be born. I had my first email account on bitnet. I surfed the emerging world of WWW with Xmosaic and similar. I understood this abstract super-structure as a way to obtain information, mainly technical information. And that is basically how I use "The Net" to this day. I did participate in uucp net news a tiny bit. I did participate in mailing lists here and there. But I never got the hang of bulletin boards, fora, or so called social networks. Maybe that has to do with my personal judgement, that "the net" does not forget. I never could see, why I should share intimate stories if they could be used against me any old time. That puts me into the corner of "tech elitist" sometimes. And yes, that bothers me sometimes. But then, I do not want to discuss neuro divergence, gender fluidity, politics, war and peace and whatever woke things are to be discussed out there. Maybe I should get an electric monk some day, the definition of which can be read in the famous books written by Douglas Adams.
I can see, however, that a lot of even technical information is closed off from me now. I cannot really dig into areas of Instagram, Meta etc. even if google will tell me, that there are "matches to my search" in there. But so what. I have said elsewhere, that Meta and the like are going to experience a fast death, if users just stop using their accounts. Not watching the endless stream of trivia, videos, whatever makes for a calm day. And I prefer calm days.
So, is the internet dead? No, not at all. But my personal signal-to-noise ratio has decreased significantly.
me goes on to stare out of the window.
~Howdy!
You've genuinely seen the Internet, then. Admittedly, I've only been using it since the early 2000s when I was right out of kindergarten, so we've definitely experienced different "growth spurts" so to say. I've always been fascinated in the early "Internet" and how so many techies have made it become the way it is today - even Reddit, for example, was once just a place to discuss tech (mostly) after all.
I can understand your feelings toward bulletin boards/social media/etc. though. It's sometimes dangerous to share your ideas. Ironically, I find this website more comfortable to share my feelings than on my public Twitter account because there is a free-range of people here. I think those topics (politics, gender, etc.) are important to speak about for many so I don't want to discredit those people (it does affect plenty of us after all) but it's hard to have honest conversations when the algorithm feeds off what's shocking or will drive off the most engagement - not what's fruitful or helps inform people.
I am definitely upset though about the lack of indexing. The Internet was built to share info, not hide it behind a login or paywall. Though of course, there are seedier aspects of indexing which is why I use alternative search engines besides Google since many of those are paid or SEO driven. That's a whole other topic though.
I think though you have a healthy relationship with the Internet and I salute you for it. Hopefully, we can all learn how to tune out some of the noise and focus on what matters. It's just hard when the Internet really IS everywhere.