Resisting the online world

"It's futile resisting change. I lived through the arrival of the internet. I remember the excitement when 28.8 bumped to 33.3 and later 56... I remember going to make a cup of tea waiting for a download manager to handle a tetchy 5mb download. CompuServe and aol portals. Telnet, MUD, bulletin boards, chat rooms. ICQ. netmeeting.

The days before Google. The days before "social" media. The days before slacktivism. I loved it. I love tech. Building pcs, rooting phones. Amazing. Online gaming, so sociable compared with gaming alone.

But at the risk of sounding like the middle aged dad that I am .. I hate it now.

The world grows ever more stupid. Why learn it when you can Google it? The matrix memory implant doesn't seem so far fetched.

The ability to regurgitate information as if you thought it, repeating without novel thought or true understanding, is distilled by the retweet button.

Twitter. Widens your field of communication massively. But in the realms of contrived comment the impression we have of the writer is a false one. It is the way they have chosen to present. En mass this is hyper reality in the extreme. A world populated by characters as if written by screen writers who wanted it to be very clear what the key features of each personality are.

Dungeons and Dragons where those playing aren't as aware that they're playing a character, but still feel slightly safe from consequence.

For the socially isolated Twitter is the chat room. For the empathetic apathetic slacktivism feels like activity.

But it's hyper real. Yet it begins to change our reality. We learn from discourse on Twitter. We change our behavior based on what we learn. Therefore Twitter changes our behaviour in the real world.

I don't mean we see more people rudely tweeting at the dining table, although we do. I mean that we encounter discussion on Twitter that might change the way we feel about, for example, discussing sexuality with our children. This changes our children's learning, which changes their lives. This can be positive or negative and happens from any source of learning, but Twitter is hyper real. A volatile source."

I wrote the above in 2015. 

In 2017 I look around and the hyper real environment doesn't excite me. It just makes me sad.

Journalists replaced by Twitter, where anyone with no consideration of their own objectivity or bias can tell stories.

Pretend Facebook families humble bragging about any old crap. People trying to live up to impossible ideals creating hyper real society.

A landscape where the UnitedStates has a president who communicates in 140 character droppings. 

Of course there are huge positives with a world with open communications, shared knowledge etc... 

But at what ugly cost.