< Death of the Internet (or not?)
Hello.
I, too, may be one of those who came to midnight.pub thinking of it as a refuge. It's scary outside the blanket. lol
But I honestly don't know whether the Internet or people are dead. Even in the early days of Facebook, I have fond memories of people asking each other how they were doing and sharing intimate stories. Even on Twitter, where the relationship was loose or unclear, I think there was a good atmosphere to some extent at first.
If we are going to say that the Internet is dead, why does it have to be now? Shouldn't death have already begun when Facebook came out?
In Korea, I watched the process of change in a community that hated each other of the opposite sex and spoke out against each other without hesitation. The community has emerged as a social problem, and has come under heavy attack from the media and public opinion, and now, on the surface, its activities have almost stopped. It is safe to say that very few people publicly claim to be members of that community. However, other side effects occurred instead. The bad guys spread out to different communities, turning many of the larger communities into hotspots for hate crimes.
I feel more like the Internet is alive rather than dead. The process of a community's rise and fall is like watching a person's life. Now is the era of Discord, but when it becomes unbearable for us, won't we leave for another place? The unfortunate thing is that the cycle of community growth and decline is getting shorter and shorter. At this point, I think we don't need another new sanctuary, but rather a space for a completely different form of communication.
My English is poor, so I am very afraid that my meaning will not be conveyed properly. :)
(~bartender, please give me a non-alcoholic beer instead of water.)
True, the Internet probably was *dead* a while ago but then again, Facebook at its launch more complimented the scene vs. "killed" the scene (since forums were still at its peak popularity).
Though I was born and raised in America, I sometimes went on Korean websites as a kid (like Naver, for example), so I can imagine the social problems that came from these hate communities. I'm not super familiar with this particular phenomenon in Korea but I think this is a general problem that happened because social media made the Internet become a lot "smaller." It's why, for example, the red pill community in the US has grown so much, allowing people to congregate on different platforms, sometimes manifesting into full-blown hate crimes.
I want to agree with you that it's alive but it's hard since social media itself is isolating (how often do we talk to strangers on it). And there appears to be no sign of moving past the current platforms that we have right now to communicate, so we're stuck looking at endless feeds full of ads. Even Discord, as great as it is, feels "separate" from the Internet because you can't index it, which means we can't archive useful info.
But I do agree that these communities' lifespans are so short + we need a new form of communication. It's hard to imagine how that will happen, but hopefully, we can find something more meaningful than what we're currently given. After all, the Internet was built to communicate and share information!
Your English is fine - you write as well as I do (lol).