2022-08-05 11:55:56 -06:00
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2023-12-24 14:42:37 -07:00
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date: 2022-08-05
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2022-09-04 16:59:13 -06:00
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title: My (online) Generation
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2022-08-05 11:55:56 -06:00
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---
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I've been on this IRC channel (Signal now) for maybe 20 years now, maybe more.
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We've wound up having multiple events where we meet in real life,
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and I consider them probably my closest friend group;
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certainly the people I've stayed in contact with for the longest.
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2023-12-24 14:42:37 -07:00
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Today (August 2022) I mentioned to them that I've dialed back how often I read the news,
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2022-08-05 11:55:56 -06:00
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and how that's really helped me,
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and we came to this sort of group consensus that we're pretty atypical.
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Like, most Americans are only dimly aware of what was going on in Washington
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whereas I have literally lost hair from stress over it.
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What I would consider to be my online generation was online way before anybody else.
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Most of us were using modems to dial bulletin boards back in the 1980s.
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We remember a time when, in order to get Windows connected to a network,
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you had to buy separate software, and it was buggy as hell.
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Most of us started using Linux in the early 1990s,
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back when only weirdos would consider using Unix for their desktop machine.
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It wasn't clear to us that networked computers were ever going to become popular,
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and seeing things like Facebook take off seem to us like we were the early pioneers.
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There's a lot more to say about what shaped our world,
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but others have probably written about it more clearly.
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2023-12-24 14:42:37 -07:00
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But I feel like, as the world has begun using the Internet more,
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it's probably challenging for highly online people to tease out what "normal" life is anymore.
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2022-08-05 11:55:56 -06:00
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It's so easy to look at hundreds of millions of people tweeting or posting on Facebook,
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and think that represents everybody's day-to-day life,
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because networked computers have been our entire existence for decades.
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2023-12-24 14:42:37 -07:00
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I'm not sure it's good for humans to be in contact with millions of other people;
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tt least, it's not something we appear to be able to handling gracefully.
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Maybe future generations will figure this out,
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and it will bring the species together in a way the world has never seen.
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We might need that to cope with what's coming in the next hundred years.
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But for now,
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for people like me who have spent a lot of time online for decades,
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it's turning out to be nice to (re)discover smaller communities.
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