6.a The (anti)Social Internet

There's like, something weirdly poetic (maybe?) about how the internet's increasing interconnectedness leaves us feeling more disconnected than before.

The "social internet" is a term I first heard used by #people/Hank_Green to describe the type of internet that most people use. To me, it's the collection of parts of the internet that emphasize the amount of users a platform has, not necessarily those users' investment in the platform, and the ways that tech companies try and extract value from those users.

The presence and prevalence of the social internet has so completely subsumed our lives in so many ways that it actually is taken for granted; when we have official government communications being disseminated on Twitter or Facebook, it lends a certain type of legitimacy, it feels more real or something.

I think that an increasing number of people are actually feeling more anti-social because of it, and I think that it can actually help understand why certain "anti-social" behaviors are being more observed in young people.