The Age of Fast Internet

School has been out for a week and we’re descending into YouTube Hell. There’s no day camp this week, and my husband and I are mostly working, so the kiddo gets left to his own devices quite a bit. “Devices” is literal. I can’t tell which is his favorite, the iPad or the gaming console that hosts Minecraft. When nobody is actively playing with or otherwise tending to him, he drifts unfailingly to one of those digital screens. I try my best to put guardrails around it, but some days are exhausting and find us granting the “ask parents for more time” permission more than we should. YouTube Kids is about 90 percent brain rot and 10 percent learning about nature. My son surprises me with facts he learns from videos about megalodons, mushrooms, and jellyfish stings, so I know it’s not all junk; but then he watches videos with the most obnoxious-sounding characters I've ever heard doing insipid things. He giggles at their antics and starts talking about them almost as if they are his naughty friends.

He’s picking up on the tics of Internet culture, which I think has no distinction from the rest of youth culture anymore. There’s lingo like “sus” and “bruh” coming out of his mouth, which was inevitable, I guess. He talks smack about “noobs”. (Sorry, I mean n00bs.) And he’s starting to cop the heightened, obsessive attitude toward ordinary things that seems to be a hallmark of people raised on the modern Internet. He says, “Mom, you’re going to scream when you see the new [Lego, Minecraft, whatever] thing I built. You’re literally going to scream.” We try to calmly tell him that no, we aren’t going to scream, and most things don’t warrant any kind of extreme reaction. He tends toward extremes anyway, in his moods and the volume at which he speaks, which often drowns out everything else. It’s impossible to tell how much comes from his natural brain and how much comes from what he is exposed to.

I’ve been noticing the hyperreactive style of discourse online for years, and it seems (to use a word that’s thrown around a lot) problematic. Every piece of media is subject to death by a thousand impressions, whether it’s torn apart by critics who don’t like some aspect that doesn’t jibe with their personal philosophy, or rendered meaningless by a chorus of people who skim it, “like” it, and share it without thinking. It seems to be all about gut feelings in a way that I don’t understand. Anything mildly cool becomes amazing, and anyone trying to genuinely share a part of themselves online is quickly sized up and either dismissed or elevated. A person’s sense of self or reality seems to be temporarily made or broken by stuff they see online. (See: “This touching video broke me.”) Everything just travels so darn fast [she grumbles while shaking fist at cloud].

I wonder how I was shaped by the Internet that existed in my childhood. We got AOL at home, on a shared computer, when I was thirteen or fourteen. The world was at my fingertips, but I had to wait for the modem to dial up before I could get to it, and I had to know what to type into a primitive search engine or use Yahoo’s page directory. Socializing took place in a chat room with text only: no videos, no GIFs, just emoticons. I built a website with Tripod and wrote an e-zine that I distributed via AOL email. Personal websites with “About Me” pages and diary entries and virtual guestbooks were everywhere, at least among people who were about my age. We were all hungry to define ourselves, and the Web gave us new ways to do that. If those same tools had been available to me 24/7, on a device with a fast connection that I didn’t have to share with my parents and brother, I might never have been motivated to do anything else. As it was, I could spent hours tweaking the HTML on my website, or stay in chat rooms late into the night, hoping to hit it off with a boy somewhere. Never mind that I was extremely insecure and couldn’t give the time of day to boys who liked me in real life.

I’m so glad that I was raised on a slow, single-browser-tab-at-a-time Internet. I did not learn to expect instant gratification; I could process information at my own pace. My life was mostly lived away from computers, with nothing controlled by a smart device. However, this did not inure me for life. I’ve fallen into periods of smartphone addiction, and my husband, who’s a decade older, is even worse. (Actually I find our Boomer parents to be the worst of all.) I can feel the effects on my mind, mood, and attention span. I’ve disabled a lot of notifications on my phone, and when I get one, I like to practice waiting a minute before checking it. Nothing on a phone is so important that it should be allowed to rewire your brain, yet many of us are letting it happen anyway.

My son’s brain is just beginning to be wired. I know how vulnerable he is, and will continue to be at least into his teens, and I’m scared. When he gets older and is granted more Internet access, his dad and I will be emphasizing restraint and critical thinking in navigating the online world. I don’t even know what kind of forces we’ll be up against when that time comes. I’m prepared to fight for my son—and all of us—to keep in touch with our humanity.