Poll says Gen Xer's would like to return to pre-internet

by SydBarrett 11 Replies latest jw friends

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  SydBarrett

  According to a new Harris Poll shared exclusively with Fast Company, most Americans would prefer to live in a simpler era before everyone was obsessed with screens and social media, and this sentiment is especially strong among older millennials and Gen Xers.

  Asked whether they would like to return to a time before humanity was “plugged in”—meaning before people had wide access to the internet and smartphones—77% of Americans age 35-54 said they would, the highest of any group.

  
  
  What would you consider your ideal level of the internet? As a Gen X'er, I would not want to go back to the per-internet world, but I would like to go back in some specific technologies.
  
  I loved smartphones when I got my first one in 2009 or so, but for the most part, i'd gladly return to landlines and an answering machine. I miss being able to leave the house and be unreachable till I got home. Yeah, you can turn off your phone or just not answer or reply to texts, but it's not the same. People now have the expectation that you will be reachable in a reasonable amount of time.
  
  I also miss the quirkiness and individuality of the late 90s internet, before it got so corporatized. Yeah alot of those self created webpages were garish and buggy, but it was fun.
  
  Modern social media is a scourge.
  
  On the plus side, if you're job searching, the modern world is much better than the days of physically mailing resumes or even driving around hand delivering them.
  
  I guess my ideal would be the very early 2000's. The internet still had personality. Flip phones were available and affordable if you felt you needed one for an emergency, but people weren't chained to them. It was becoming affordable for average income people to ditch dial up and get broadband. I got my first 1.5MPS broadband connection in late '99 if I remember correctly.
  
  What are your thoughts?
  
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  TonusOH

  I like the faster speeds and having so much information at my fingertips. I avoid social media for the most part, because it works okay in very small doses but consumes people once they are participating daily. I think we'll either adapt to the volume of daily interaction or learn to throttle it back to something that doesn't seem so overwhelming.

  It did teach us that we take common sense for granted, sometimes. I guess the videos of people trying the cinnamon challenge will be a lasting reminder that, after decades of growing our knowledge by leaps and bounds, humans are still capable of epic levels of stupid behavior.
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  SydBarrett

  "I like the faster speeds and having so much information at my fingertips."
  
  
  I do too but so much of the good stuff is pay-walled now. It's understandable, but for a while a lot of newspapers and magazine had their archives available and searchable to anyone. As a history nerd, it was interesting to go back and read how people were reacting to historical events before they knew the outcome. It gave a feel for what it must have been like to live through the times. You can still do it, but you've got to break out the credit card for whatever archive you want to search.
  
  It's also a shame IMO, that dowloading music pretty much killed the LP format. It's gone back to a singles market like the 1950's. May not seem a big deal to some, but I thought it was a cool art form and there's no point anymore in a band even attempting a 'Dark side of the Moon' or 'Abbey Road' or 'Siamese Dream' or 'Ok Computer' or whatever because no one is gonna buy it. They're just gonna download the hit single.
  
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  Biahi

  I love the internet, but I absolutely hate the amount of scammers that use the internet.
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  Beth Sarim

  A return to pre-internet times could be here before you know it.

  The way the sun is behaving with these solar mass eruptions,,,the internet may go down in an instant.

  If such a solar eruption as the 1859 Carrington event. Such an event today would not only mean the end of the internet,,,,but would send all of civilization into a tailspin.

  The end of the internet could very well happen.
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  Vidiot

  All the trappings of civilization can and will collapse at any moment!

  This is our inevitable future:

  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UtjGTrVwRr4
  
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  Beth Sarim

  One of these ""solar superflares"" could happen during any one of these peak solar events. Leaving an "internet apocalypse" in it's wake.

  Maybe worse,,,collapse of the complete electrical system with catastrophic results worldwide.

  The Borg"s response;

  ''HMMfff,doesn"t bother me''

  ""Don't worry, it'll get worse''

  :""we've been expecting this''

  AS they sit there in their ivory towers as the world spirals into chaos and disarray.
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  Journeyman

  I love the convenience that today's wider internet access, speeds and technologies have brought but I agree that one of the worst aspects is the overreach of social media.

  Another huge potential problem that I believe is looming is linked to the global risk to cybersecurity (which also takes in the issue of possible sunspot activity that Beth Sarim mentioned)

  Back in the early days of the internet, right through really to only about 10 years or so ago, critical systems still retained manual backups. Banks, emergency services (911 in the USA, 999 in the UK, etc), social security systems and many others were bringing in computerised operations but they still retained some fallback manual systems or alternative means of access for users in case of critical failure.

  Today that's more or less gone, or on the way out, which I fear is actually making our increasingly tech-dependent world more vulnerable not less.

  We've already had numerous warnings from periods of hacking activity or outages which have affected financial payments, traffic control and other critical systems in different countries at various times. To date, most of these issues have so far been inconvenient rather than catastrophic, but I suspect it's only a matter of time, with how dependent we are becoming on technology and the fact that so many analogue or manual backup systems have been totally removed, that a nation somewhere may suffer a complete meltdown, either accidentally or caused by sabotage.

  A related issue is how many governments and corporations have used increased technology to restrict choice. For example, in the early days of electronic payment it was sold as a convenient alternative way to pay for things that increased customer choice. But now, increasingly the 'old' ways of payment (cash, cheque, etc) are being, or have been, completely removed in favour of solely card or online. Many shops won't take cash now, only card and contactless, and where the option to pay cash remains it's being swiftly marginalised - supermarkets increasingly replacing their humans at checkouts with self-service points which at first used to take cash or card, but often are being 'upgraded' to card only ones now.

  Ultimately, that's a restriction of customer choice and, linked to my earlier point, makes shopping more vulnerable to future system failure. Imagine the trouble that could be caused if/when all cash payment is gone but a technical failure or cyberattack causes all store checkouts to go down?

  And don't get me started with the nonsense of cryptocurrencies and NFTs...
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  FFGhost

  Random thoughts....

  One thing I really love is how we have GPS systems at our fingertips. If I'm in a new city, I don't have to memorize maps and hunt down street names and worry about wandering into a skinky part of town by accident. I just pull out the smart phone, pick a place I want to go, and walk there. I never worry about "getting lost" anymore.

  One thing I really hate is what I would call "loss of charm". Like, say, I traveled to some dinky little US southern town, and happened to visit their Class A minor league baseball stadium to take in a game. While at the stadium, I could buy a souvenir cap of the "Podunk Gristmillers" or whatever their team is. The only place in the world where you could buy a "Podunk Gristmillers" baseball cap was to actually go to Podunk and visit the stadium. When you got back home, you could wear the cap and have a "story to tell" about where it came from, and your travels there, etc. etc. It was a way to start a conversation about your travels.

  Today, you can order from any of, oh, 280 different websites which sell baseball caps from every city, from every decade, with every variation, and Amazon will deliver it to your front door in 48 hours. No effort, no interesting stories, no "charm".

  It doesn't have to be "baseball caps" and "small towns" - purchasing [anything which used to be kind of fun and unique and regional] is effortless and the sentimental, emotional part of it is gone.
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  joey jojo

  Interesting that gen x'ers feel this way.

  When the internet started becoming mainstream in 1993, us gen x'ers were finishing high school, attending uni, or starting jobs, so we were the last generation to finish our entire school life without the internet, although video games and improving computer technology was a part of our lives.

  Could it be the disaffected gen x, latch-key generation scepticism rearing its head again? Happy and comfortable with technology, but not as excited about it as the snowflake generation seems to be?