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(what follows started off structured and devolved into a stream of consciousness post)
There was a time in my youth when I first connected to the internet in the early to mid-1990s. I was a teenager then and exploring what it means to be connected to people outside of your own hometown community. At that time there weren't these large social networks that we have today, and the best you could do was either IRC, ICQ, or AIM for instant messaging, but even then you had to be online and most - if not all - of your contacts were just your friends and acquaintances from school.
I had forgotten about it, but I distinctly remember sitting down at my family's one home computer with a dial-up connection and being in front of a CRT screen that was displaying the Geocities site that a friend and I made (he lived up the road). We were learning how to write HTML and one of the biggest things to consider was "what are we going to do with this thing?" and "what's it going to look like?" Underneath that question was what we were really asking: "what is it that we think other people will want to read or like on this online digital expression of ourselves?" It was a turning point, I think, for a lot of people: a time from which they no longer thought inwards and retained information to tell their friends and family, but now outwards, towards a faceless "everyone" of the Internet. I think this time in history (each person had their own) was very important because it was the beginning of an epoch when people started thinking FOR and ABOUT the internet in their minds, which is an ethereal place that may as well be the same as thinking about a movie but one you can contribute to. The closest anyone could get at that time, in my opinion, was writing into the newspaper and having a Letter To The Editor posted posted on the back page of the first section where people might see the opinions that some moderator (the editor) deemed good enough to post to the world.
This is the time when the Internet started it's panopticon-like hold on our psyches.
As the years have worn on since the 90s and being on the internet is as ubiquitous and expected as going to get groceries, I'd noticed that my mind will think about things on the Internet, even when I'm not on the Internet. For instance, I'll be heading into work and a random thought will pop into my head (like writing this gemlog, for instance), and I'll start crafting how I want to write this entry. You might say, "what's wrong with that?" but my argument is this: if you were to write it in a journal instead, would you phrase things the same way, and would you have the same tone? No, no you wouldn't. So in a way you are still filtering yourself in order to present something to the anonymous online communities that you participate in. Some may say "this is the unfiltered me and I don't give a shit who sees me" but I still don't believe that somehow, somewhere, the fact that you're choosing to express yourself online instead of with friends, family, colleagues, or others in person, is, in itself, an angle of your personality that you've crafted for the online world.
My point here is this: that the Internet has infiltrated our thoughts even when we're not actively using it. We've been trained to think of things to contribute to a digital world that purely exists in digits and what your brain makes real of that world. Just look around you and try to talk to a relative or friend that's engrossed in their phone - it takes them a couple seconds to realize you're trying to interact with them and they pull away from their phones. Sure they talk to you, but I'll bet money that in the back of their minds they're thinking about finishing what you interrupted. I do this too, and the thing that we fool ourselves with is thinking that we're still engaged with what's around us when our eyes are glued to a cell phone screen. "I can multitask, and nothing much is going on around me anyway," we think, but it's just not the case.
I know there's been a lot of memes and hate about "being in the moment," and I remember this one meme that was something like "<insert tragic event here> - these people were really in the moment, and look at them now". But really, I will die on this hill... I'm of the mind that the Internet is actively monopolizing our thoughts and the newer generations know no other way than an outward expression of themselves that others have to judge. Sure, there was similar judgement from the physical world, but that's just the people around you and you can actually go and be yourself somewhere else - the Internet is an all-seeing, always-there, judging panopticon that controls your psyche in one way or another whether you want to believe it or not.
This is why I'm a bad nerd. I grew up in the 90s with stars in my eyes and a keyboard and mouse in my hands, but now I find myself retreating away from what all of this has enabled - a web that's supposed to keep your mind on a particular product or service so that they can sell you more. That's the reason I jumped on Gemini and dumped all social media years ago. I don't like the surveillance, and I don't like my mind and attention being something that's commoditized for monetary gain.
I might do a dumb phone challenge again, just to see if I can. My partner will hate it (again), but I'm thinking about it.
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2023-12-26
Tags: internet, panopticon
Gritty
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