Headline, December 29 2023/ ''' THE INTERNET TAP '''

''' THE INTERNET TAP '''

! WOW INTERNET LIGHT ! : ON THE WORLD STUDENTS SOCIETY - the students are everywhere - and they miss not a word, no happening, no injustice, no child abuse, no corruption, no tragedy, no war, no suffering, and no poverty.

The students find corners, group chats, message boards, and they go everywhere geared to '' building a new and a better world '' focused on their service to humanity and future generations rather than the general engagement bait that otherwise dominates.

' THE PURITY TEST ' : '' HOWEVER, IN 2023, the Internet left me behind. The year millennials have aged out of the Internet. AND recently I found the task of wasting time online, increasingly onerous,'' writes author Max Read.

The websites I used to depend on have gotten worse, and it seems as if there's nowhere else to look. Twitter has been transformed under new management into an increasingly untenable social experiment called X.

Instagram is evolving into somehow-even-lower rent TikTok, while TikTok itself continues to baffle and alienate me. Even Reddit, a stalwart last resort of time wasting, briefly went dark in June during a sitewide revolt over new policies.

SOMETHING is changing about the Internet, and I am not the only person to have noticed.  Everywhere I turned online this year, someone was mourning. 

'' AMAZON is ''making itself worse'' [ as New York's magazine moaned ].

Google search is a ''bloated and over monetized'' tragedy [ as The Atlantic lamented ] ; ''social media is doomed to die,'' [ as the tech news website The Verge proclaimed ].

Even TikTok is becoming  ''enjunkified'' [ to bowdlerize an inventive coinage of the sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow, republished in Wired ]. But the main complaint I have heard is put best, and most bluntly, in  The New Yorker : '' The Internet Isn't Fun Anymore.''

It's indisputable that we are living through a transitional period in the short history of the internet.

The end of the low interest-rate era has shaken up the economics of startups, ending rapid growth practices like ''blitzscaling'' and reducing the number of new internet businesses vying for our attention.

Companies like Alphabet and Facebook are now mature and dominant businesses instead of disruptive upstarts. 

But I suspect there is another factor driving the alienation and discomfort felt by many of the people who feel as though the internet is dying before our eyes : We're getting old.

For more than a decade now, millennials like myself have effectively [ and, in the case of our cohort's richest member, Mark Zuckerberg, quite literally] run the internet.

We were the earliest adopters of smartphones and we once consistently [ not that I'd brag about it ] led the generational pack in screen time.

Over that period we've grown used to an internet whose form and culture was significantly shaped by and moulded to our preferences.

The American internet of the 2010s was an often stupid and almost always embarrassing internet - but it was a millennial internet.

There were no social networks on which we felt uncomfortable; no culture developments we didn't engender; no image micros we didn't understand.

This now seems to be changing. There was a time in my life when it was trivial to sign up to a new social network and pickup its patterns and mores on the fly. Now, I feel exhausted by the prospect.

Google Search and Amazon may have gotten worse in an absolute sense, but so too has my patience for finding stuff.

Millennials are increasingly joined online and off by people who have never heard the sound of a modern handshake in their lives and never asked '' a/s/I '' in an AOL chat room.

We've been used to wielding an innate understanding of the web's capabilities and culture to our advantage; our knowledge of ''how to search Google'' and '' how to use emoji '' and " how to deploy the ' Sarcastic Wonka ' meme,'' which may have once given us an edge in multigenerational workplaces and social settings, is simply irrelevant to people younger than us.

According to the consumer research firm GWI, millennials' screen time has been on a steady decline for years. Only 42 percent of 30-to 49-years-old say they're online ''almost constantly,'' compared to 49 percent of 18-to-29 years olds.

We're no longer the earliest adopters, even : 18-to-29 years olds are more likely to have used ChatGPT than 30-to-49-year-olds - though maybe only because we're no longer being assigned homework.

These stats confirm what a brief survey of popular posts on TikTok or Instagram or X will already tell you : The heaviest users and most engaged American audience on the internet are no longer millennials but our successors in Gen Z.

If the internet is no longer '' fun '' for millennials, it may simply be because it's not our interest anymore. It belongs to zoomers now.

Welcome All To The World Students Society - for every subject in the world.

The Honour and Serving of the Latest Global Operational on Internet, World and the Millennials,  continues. The World  Students Society thanks author Max Read - a journalist, screenwriter and editor.  He writes Read Max, a newsletter about technology, politics and culture.

With most respectful and loving dedication to The Global Founder Framers of The World Students Society - the exclusive and eternal ownership of every student in the world : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter X -!E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless