Welcome again to everybody! Make yourself at home. Enjoy the expertly designed Stalin flag thing. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is our weekly discussion thread!
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I’m an early zoomer (you know, genZ-edong) already living in adulthood. Not long ago I was thinking about that time of my teenage years in which I spent way too much time on the internet, during that era ranging from rage faces, nyan cat and the golden age of creepypastas until the peak in popularity of cringe culture youtube channels, all while browsing completely unsupervised. If you are any like me, you will be familiarised with the feeling that you would like to tell your past self to get off the computer, thinking that probably doing so would have saved you from many problems and made your future life somewhat easier.
It has been however only now as I have rejoined internet communities (yes, such as lemmygrad) that I have noticed that the later members of gen Z seem not only to be commiting the same mistakes I myself did, but more severely and with a much greater dependency on the internet than I ever had, neglecting to a worrying level the development of skills as basic as socialization and critical thinking. Is it just me who is becoming a grumpy old man yelling at clouds, or does anyone else share the same concerns?
My brain is destroyed from the internet.
As one such ‘later’ zoomer, that is very true. Most of us are very alienated. I know some people who spent over half of their day on their phone when they’re not in school. I personally have to force myself to actually read, and talk to people, but I’m making some progress. I’m somewhat lucky for my attention span’s sake that I was a Redditor (no longer) and not a Tiktoker, as that seems to drain brains faster.
Tik Tok’s format is something that I find terrifying, and even more than the rest of internet social media is trying to follow it, such as with Youtube and its shorts. The fact that instant gratification is being promoted for profit so badly that we have now a flow of videos with Subway Surfers gameplays on the side not to lose watchers’ attentions is simply sinister.
At least back then we fried our neurons watching things like these for three and a half minutes without blinking instead.