The dominance of social media and total financial exploitation ruined the internet and now is damaging society at large. It‘s now a machine that amplifies anxiety, hate, and addiction.
I’d argue that exploitation is so rampant, next gen will avoid it like wildfire.
The current generation of young people is the opposite of rebellious.
Unless there’s a money hack, not for long.
I managed to dodge a lot of bullets growing up as a ‘gamer girl’. I played EQ instead of WoW and later on instead of CoD lobbies I played MAG. Still have really fond memories of this group of older guys that took me in as their medic. Never anything creepy, they just knew I was happy to play that role and got pretty good at it.
Generational categories aren’t real. They’re arbitrary lines made up for listicals and inflammatory content. There is every type of person in every generation, and most trends are more due to the natural progression of age than generation drift.
Comparing generations is only useful when evaluating the context in which they live(d).
It covers shared experiences decently well. Like obviously there is overlap but in the U.S. as a whole most millennials were kids who have a memory of a pre 9/11 world. Most zoomers grew up with WiFi being common in their houses. Most Gen Xers have memories of being a child near the end of the Cold War and were in the work force before Internet was common. Most boomers either served in the Vietnam war or have a memory of someone close to them going off to fight in an unpopular war.
A lot of those experiences have lasting effects in how those generations behave. It doesn’t mean everyone is the same but instead that you can follow trends that are more true for each generation
Then there is also the advantage of tracking a groups shared experiences like for example many millennials were relatively unaffected by the dotcom bubble but for the 2008 recession they were hit much harder
Right. So, my last sentence then.
The terms are used to convey a group that would buy shit. They are not anthropology terms. They are marketing terminology used to sell you shit. I’m sure today’s students like to use them in their anthropology papers though
To be fair styles project and rotten.com were there well before millennials.
Na, but Millenials used it in their (pre-)teens seeing some fucked-up shit (and strangely most of us are still fine)
Remember that the front page of reddit had jailbait and coontown posts hitting the top regularly. After that it was fatpeoplehate.
People were just as deranged back in the day it just manifested more aggressively.
In the cod4 days id regularly scream slurs at people and tell them to kill themselves. It was just what you did.
The real scathing insult was just “uninstall”
Calling out Millennials for Fascism when Gen Z helped elect Trump 2.0 is just fucking rich.
We die all the fucked up things in the early internet. Things that are now forgotten. Theres not much that kids these can do on the internet that we didn’t. The main difference now is the nazi pipeline. We didn’t have that.
No LiveLeak? SomethingAwful? PORK CHOP SANDWICHES?
Liveleak
It goes way further back than that: https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/controlling-the-virtual-world/history/rape.html
I used to frequent LambdaMOO. Things weren’t all that different back then than they are now.
No OP being a bundle of sticks?
Pizza bombing
I’m so glad I didn’t participate in any of these trends when I was that age. So many regrets avoided.
Honestly. Many things were so much better before.
If you didn’t like it on the internet, you could just not use it. Nowadays everyone with a pulse is forced to be on the internet, even if they shouldn’t.
People used to understand that things existing digitally, meant that they would spread on the internet. Including and especially incriminating stuff. Trolling people who where clueless used to be fun too. The iOS7 update campaign where people were stupid enough to microwave their phones to charge them was incredibly funny.
There wasn’t karmawhoring or attention seeking, in fact you would be chastised for acting like you wanted attention.
I miss the era of SA/4chan/YTMND being the meme factories of the internet.
It was chaotic, yes, but goddamn were there fewer problems
