Very true. The two excerpts you highlighted were the ones that stood out to me as well. There is a definite need for kids-only spaces online, especially when the only ones around now are basically...
Very true. The two excerpts you highlighted were the ones that stood out to me as well.
There is a definite need for kids-only spaces online, especially when the only ones around now are basically the often-distilled toxicity of multiplayer video games. I often wonder about my younger relatives and how the internet is shaping their childhoods but I don't interact with them often enough to gauge the impacts well.
I worry about this occasionally too. I have a niece and nephew in particular who I worry come across things on YouTube that will suck them into the right-wing propaganda sphere. If I had kids I...
I worry about this occasionally too. I have a niece and nephew in particular who I worry come across things on YouTube that will suck them into the right-wing propaganda sphere. If I had kids I would be stricter about their internet usage than my parents were with me, and I would try my best to tell them about the propaganda and how they can avoid it before letting them loose on the internet.
Not that you shouldn't worry, but honestly, most kids are generally pretty okay when it comes to the internet. We hear and see the horror stories online because we live here and this is where they...
Not that you shouldn't worry, but honestly, most kids are generally pretty okay when it comes to the internet. We hear and see the horror stories online because we live here and this is where they get broadcast, but it doesn't capture the idea that there are a lot of well-adjusted kids out there doing fine, even with pretty unrestricted internet access. Things could certainly be better, but they're not as bad as we probably feel that they are.
It's also good to point out the upsides of the modern internet for kids, one of which in particular is queer-inclusive spaces and access to information on LGBT issues. Almost all students now start to self-identify and come out online before doing so in person, and that process usually involves finding a safe digital community in which they can start to express themselves and explore their identities.
I'm always amazed at how informed my LGBT students are on LGBT issues relative to how young they are, and it's because they live and breathe it as part of their internet subculture, in the same way another kid might do for Minecraft or Undertale. I consider this a pretty solid good in general, and it means a lot to me personally. The first openly gay person I met in my life was in college, and I didn't come out until my 20s. To think that used to be the norm is mind-boggling to me for how archaic and repressive it now seems, and I'm saying that as someone who outright lived it, and not that long ago! That's not to say that this doesn't still happen, only that it happens far, far less. It's definitely not the norm anymore.
Kids don't have to wait like I did to find connections and community. They don't have to feel alone and broken, and hide who they are from the world. Especially those who can't come out to their families or communities, online spaces now offer them a welcoming and understanding place to live digitally. It's not ideal, but it's way better than what I had, and again, I have to stress, I'm not even that old!
So, while there are definitely legitimate concerns about children and the internet, know that some kids genuinely are alright -- in fact, for some of them, they might be more alright now than they ever would have been before.
That's great to hear. I'm fairly removed from being that age and I'm not around people that age very often so I'm not really aware of what they're up to. I do have a generally positive opinion of...
That's great to hear. I'm fairly removed from being that age and I'm not around people that age very often so I'm not really aware of what they're up to. I do have a generally positive opinion of the kids these days and I love that they're vocal about things (and particularly the right things), and I guess I hadn't squared that with my worry about the right-wing propaganda that is all over the place. That's honestly reassuring, so thank you for sharing it with me.
I think the article makes some great points. When I came of age on the internet 10-15 years ago the internet wasn't as centralized as it is now. Reddit and Twitter didn't have tens of millions of...
I think the article makes some great points. When I came of age on the internet 10-15 years ago the internet wasn't as centralized as it is now. Reddit and Twitter didn't have tens of millions of users, interaction on Facebook was limited to who you were friends with, and the amount of people you could see and be seen by was on the scale of thousands usually, not millions as it is if your post gets a lot of attention.
I know it's partly nostalgia talking, but I really do feel like the internet is a meaner, more hostile place than it was in 2006 or so. I remember the phrase "the internet hate machine" being thrown around then, but it's nothing compared to now. There were no harassment campaigns on the scale that we sometimes see now, and while there were probably propaganda / disinformation campaigns, they also weren't on the scale that we see now. While ad networks were prone to serving viruses, no one was trying to use your computer to mine cryptocurrency, no one was encrypting your data for ransom, and user tracking was a lot less invasive than it is now. Even then an ad blocker was a must, but now both that and noscript are must-haves for a tolerable browsing experience. And as the interviewee said, the people in charge of the tech giants have no interest in making their sites a healthier place to be because that would affect their bottom line.
The internet has been mainstream for about 25 years and I think we're still having growing pains and will for some time. Hopefully eventually we'll be able to use it responsibly.
Edit: I want to say a bit more about what that looks like. I hope that software development reaches the quality that building homes and cars and planes has reached. I hope that we become more aware of and resistant to disinformation campaigns, and I hope to an extent it becomes less centralized again.
I think the centralization and near oligopolization of the internet is a major contributor. Imagine if we waved a wand tomorrow and practically everyone were living in megacities with basically no...
I think the centralization and near oligopolization of the internet is a major contributor. Imagine if we waved a wand tomorrow and practically everyone were living in megacities with basically no more small towns and villages. Would our IRL interactions and culture really end up being that different in real life from what we see online? I'd expect more or less the same pollution, the same dehumanization. In many ways it seems like we're living overcrowded/overpopulated digital lives.
Agreed. Scope is a huge component in this, and I think it's buttressed by another factor: comment and topic structures. When I think about the internet of the 2000s, most of my experience was in...
Agreed. Scope is a huge component in this, and I think it's buttressed by another factor: comment and topic structures.
When I think about the internet of the 2000s, most of my experience was in flat, linear forums. You'd have a topic and pages of posts, all one after the other. The idea was that people could comment on a topic and to/alongside one another, but everyone was participating linearly, on a single level. If somebody said something awful on page 6 of the topic but the comments were already on page 12, you weren't going to go back to that because the topic had already moved on.
Threaded comment structures like we have here, as well as person-based feeds like Twitter, shift the paradigm from "people collectively comment on topics together, one at a time" to "anyone can comment to anyone else or on anything at any time". Not only does it make discussions a complete free-for-all, but it also increases the surface area for friction exponentially. A crappy comment can no longer "die on page 6" so to speak, and in fact most platforms are designed around allowing that crappy comment to be aired and shared well beyond the readership of that one topic.
That's where the scale you identified comes into play. Any bit of information can go from zero to sixty-million views literally overnight. It's breathtaking, really, but is it a good thing? Based on what I've seen of modern social media, I would say no.
I don't think that's an accurate comparison, but I get what you're saying. I've never lived anywhere bigger than a metro area of a million people, but I don't think you can reach people in real...
I don't think that's an accurate comparison, but I get what you're saying. I've never lived anywhere bigger than a metro area of a million people, but I don't think you can reach people in real life the same way you can reach people on the internet. Something that I say here could be read by a million people, but for that to happen in real life would take a lot longer and a lot more effort than it does online. Likewise, it would take a lot more time and effort for people to individually harass me than it does on the internet. People have lived in cities the size of New York City or Chicago for centuries and while I never have, I don't think they feel dehumanized because of it. I think we might have to abandon small towns and villages for cities in the future, but that's a separate discussion.
I agree with your main point though. We used to all be in separate, relatively insulated forums which made it easier to hide and not be harassed. I hope we go back to that dynamic eventually, because not only does it reduce harassment but it also produces better discussion because you get to know who you're talking to.
Besides the point that you need to scale up at least an order of magnitude from NY for the type of megacities I meant that would compare with online life, most people who move from rural life or...
People have lived in cities the size of New York City or Chicago for centuries and while I never have, I don't think they feel dehumanized because of it.
Besides the point that you need to scale up at least an order of magnitude from NY for the type of megacities I meant that would compare with online life, most people who move from rural life or small towns to big cities recognize the impact of that move on how they treat people if they remain in the city. It may not often be expressed as feeling dehumanized (though it's often the case), but we are more often able to identify how we dehumanize others. We don't make a huge deal about it because it's subtle and because we largely have to desensitize ourselves to certain things when living in cities, but it's very much a thing.
That's fair. I do like the waving-to-everyone culture of my hometown, but I don't like that everyone knows I'm trans by now but almost no one outside of my friends acknowledges it and calls me the...
That's fair. I do like the waving-to-everyone culture of my hometown, but I don't like that everyone knows I'm trans by now but almost no one outside of my friends acknowledges it and calls me the right name.
Found this to be an insightful article, especially in light of the other ongoing discussion regarding the editing of the Scots Wikipedia page. An interesting quote from the interview:
Found this to be an insightful article, especially in light of the other ongoing discussion regarding the editing of the Scots Wikipedia page. An interesting quote from the interview:
ANAND: There's this eternal fear in every generation that, because of new technologies and new things in the culture, young people's minds are being destroyed. They won't read anymore. They won't have attention spans. It often turns out to be bullshit. Rock and roll didn't actually destroy baby boomers. So separating the bullshit concerns that are just eternal that older people have about new things, do you actually think there are any shifts we should be worried about in terms of young people and the internet?
TAYLOR: Here's what people should be worried about, which I feel very strongly about. Harassment is what people need to take seriously. And I mean vicious harassment, doxxing, brigading. None of these platforms takes online harassment seriously. None of them even protects you from bullying, really, which is inevitable on the internet. But these platforms have been run by privileged white men, and they have absolutely no idea of what the experience is like for women, for anyone from a marginalized background. And it's horrible. If you want to talk about what's ruining people's mental health, and what's actually detrimental to young people today, it's the fact that they can be exposed to vicious online harassment from an extremely young age.
They’re being brought up in this world where these platforms have absolutely no concern for user safety, and they'll de-prioritize it in favor of engagement and all of these other metrics that they use to monetize. I try to sound the alarm on it all the time. It's very serious. I talk to young people a lot, and I've seen how it can destroy people's mental health and ruin kids' lives. And not just kids; older people, too. But, unfortunately, so often the victims of really horrible harassment are women, people of color, Black people, people that don't have the ability to detach from it. It can feel so overwhelming to them.
ANAND: Given what you chronicle, how do you think the experience of coming of age as a young person is different from before? I'm thinking about coming of age with this harassment as a possibility, but also the inverse of harassment, which is needing to constantly have this marketized affirmation, these likes. I wonder how you think it is changing the experience of being young.
TAYLOR: Everything happens in public now, and the public eye can be turned on you at any second. And I think that has shifted. I would say that's really in the past few years. Anyone can go viral for anything.
What I find jarring is just how many young people are out there engaging within the adult world on the internet. What is that saying? On the internet, no one knows you're a dog. It's very much like: on the internet, no one knows you're a kid. And like I said, for most of my stories, I'll notice something, and then I'll try to find out the people behind it. And it ends up being kids.
They're really competing out there on the internet every day in this adult world, talking to adults. I just never would have talked to an adult when I was a teenager. Obviously, it's slightly terrifying. I think, especially if I was a parent of a teen, I would worry. I try to be so sensitive about that, too, when I write about young people or anyone under 18, especially. I think you see that in things like activism, or the climate movement, or any of this online activism that's happening. It's driven by young people engaging in the adult world in a very direct way. And so I think that's a big shift.
Very true. The two excerpts you highlighted were the ones that stood out to me as well.
There is a definite need for kids-only spaces online, especially when the only ones around now are basically the often-distilled toxicity of multiplayer video games. I often wonder about my younger relatives and how the internet is shaping their childhoods but I don't interact with them often enough to gauge the impacts well.
I worry about this occasionally too. I have a niece and nephew in particular who I worry come across things on YouTube that will suck them into the right-wing propaganda sphere. If I had kids I would be stricter about their internet usage than my parents were with me, and I would try my best to tell them about the propaganda and how they can avoid it before letting them loose on the internet.
Not that you shouldn't worry, but honestly, most kids are generally pretty okay when it comes to the internet. We hear and see the horror stories online because we live here and this is where they get broadcast, but it doesn't capture the idea that there are a lot of well-adjusted kids out there doing fine, even with pretty unrestricted internet access. Things could certainly be better, but they're not as bad as we probably feel that they are.
It's also good to point out the upsides of the modern internet for kids, one of which in particular is queer-inclusive spaces and access to information on LGBT issues. Almost all students now start to self-identify and come out online before doing so in person, and that process usually involves finding a safe digital community in which they can start to express themselves and explore their identities.
I'm always amazed at how informed my LGBT students are on LGBT issues relative to how young they are, and it's because they live and breathe it as part of their internet subculture, in the same way another kid might do for Minecraft or Undertale. I consider this a pretty solid good in general, and it means a lot to me personally. The first openly gay person I met in my life was in college, and I didn't come out until my 20s. To think that used to be the norm is mind-boggling to me for how archaic and repressive it now seems, and I'm saying that as someone who outright lived it, and not that long ago! That's not to say that this doesn't still happen, only that it happens far, far less. It's definitely not the norm anymore.
Kids don't have to wait like I did to find connections and community. They don't have to feel alone and broken, and hide who they are from the world. Especially those who can't come out to their families or communities, online spaces now offer them a welcoming and understanding place to live digitally. It's not ideal, but it's way better than what I had, and again, I have to stress, I'm not even that old!
So, while there are definitely legitimate concerns about children and the internet, know that some kids genuinely are alright -- in fact, for some of them, they might be more alright now than they ever would have been before.
That's great to hear. I'm fairly removed from being that age and I'm not around people that age very often so I'm not really aware of what they're up to. I do have a generally positive opinion of the kids these days and I love that they're vocal about things (and particularly the right things), and I guess I hadn't squared that with my worry about the right-wing propaganda that is all over the place. That's honestly reassuring, so thank you for sharing it with me.
I think the article makes some great points. When I came of age on the internet 10-15 years ago the internet wasn't as centralized as it is now. Reddit and Twitter didn't have tens of millions of users, interaction on Facebook was limited to who you were friends with, and the amount of people you could see and be seen by was on the scale of thousands usually, not millions as it is if your post gets a lot of attention.
I know it's partly nostalgia talking, but I really do feel like the internet is a meaner, more hostile place than it was in 2006 or so. I remember the phrase "the internet hate machine" being thrown around then, but it's nothing compared to now. There were no harassment campaigns on the scale that we sometimes see now, and while there were probably propaganda / disinformation campaigns, they also weren't on the scale that we see now. While ad networks were prone to serving viruses, no one was trying to use your computer to mine cryptocurrency, no one was encrypting your data for ransom, and user tracking was a lot less invasive than it is now. Even then an ad blocker was a must, but now both that and noscript are must-haves for a tolerable browsing experience. And as the interviewee said, the people in charge of the tech giants have no interest in making their sites a healthier place to be because that would affect their bottom line.
The internet has been mainstream for about 25 years and I think we're still having growing pains and will for some time. Hopefully eventually we'll be able to use it responsibly.
Edit: I want to say a bit more about what that looks like. I hope that software development reaches the quality that building homes and cars and planes has reached. I hope that we become more aware of and resistant to disinformation campaigns, and I hope to an extent it becomes less centralized again.
I think the centralization and near oligopolization of the internet is a major contributor. Imagine if we waved a wand tomorrow and practically everyone were living in megacities with basically no more small towns and villages. Would our IRL interactions and culture really end up being that different in real life from what we see online? I'd expect more or less the same pollution, the same dehumanization. In many ways it seems like we're living overcrowded/overpopulated digital lives.
Agreed. Scope is a huge component in this, and I think it's buttressed by another factor: comment and topic structures.
When I think about the internet of the 2000s, most of my experience was in flat, linear forums. You'd have a topic and pages of posts, all one after the other. The idea was that people could comment on a topic and to/alongside one another, but everyone was participating linearly, on a single level. If somebody said something awful on page 6 of the topic but the comments were already on page 12, you weren't going to go back to that because the topic had already moved on.
Threaded comment structures like we have here, as well as person-based feeds like Twitter, shift the paradigm from "people collectively comment on topics together, one at a time" to "anyone can comment to anyone else or on anything at any time". Not only does it make discussions a complete free-for-all, but it also increases the surface area for friction exponentially. A crappy comment can no longer "die on page 6" so to speak, and in fact most platforms are designed around allowing that crappy comment to be aired and shared well beyond the readership of that one topic.
That's where the scale you identified comes into play. Any bit of information can go from zero to sixty-million views literally overnight. It's breathtaking, really, but is it a good thing? Based on what I've seen of modern social media, I would say no.
I don't think that's an accurate comparison, but I get what you're saying. I've never lived anywhere bigger than a metro area of a million people, but I don't think you can reach people in real life the same way you can reach people on the internet. Something that I say here could be read by a million people, but for that to happen in real life would take a lot longer and a lot more effort than it does online. Likewise, it would take a lot more time and effort for people to individually harass me than it does on the internet. People have lived in cities the size of New York City or Chicago for centuries and while I never have, I don't think they feel dehumanized because of it. I think we might have to abandon small towns and villages for cities in the future, but that's a separate discussion.
I agree with your main point though. We used to all be in separate, relatively insulated forums which made it easier to hide and not be harassed. I hope we go back to that dynamic eventually, because not only does it reduce harassment but it also produces better discussion because you get to know who you're talking to.
Besides the point that you need to scale up at least an order of magnitude from NY for the type of megacities I meant that would compare with online life, most people who move from rural life or small towns to big cities recognize the impact of that move on how they treat people if they remain in the city. It may not often be expressed as feeling dehumanized (though it's often the case), but we are more often able to identify how we dehumanize others. We don't make a huge deal about it because it's subtle and because we largely have to desensitize ourselves to certain things when living in cities, but it's very much a thing.
That's fair. I do like the waving-to-everyone culture of my hometown, but I don't like that everyone knows I'm trans by now but almost no one outside of my friends acknowledges it and calls me the right name.
Found this to be an insightful article, especially in light of the other ongoing discussion regarding the editing of the Scots Wikipedia page. An interesting quote from the interview: