
Goodbye internet?
Is the internet over?
I was just chatting with a very wise friend yesterday about the recently-announced changes to Meta. Fact checking on social media may quickly become a distant memory.
The very conversation was wild to me. I did my journalism training in the days before social media became an unofficial news source for the world. At the time, if you wanted your news you went to Twitter. However, you knew to official feeds from people who were actually in the room and could report in real time.
Today Twitter, now X, has largely morphed into Elon Musk’s social experiment, and has lost significant credibility with news outlets. In its absence, Meta has largely stepped in to fill that void, and is definitely a main source of ‘news’ and ‘information’…at least a link to it for those outside of Canada.
So while mainstream news outlets are now reporting on what may be allowed on untethered social media platforms, and users are making sweeping proclamations (ironically on their own social feeds) about reducing time on their platforms, we need to ask – is the internet all but dead?
The answer is a resounding ‘no.’ Here’s why.
Oh, to be young again…
The first reason is our youth. I happen to teach a few courses at a local college to a group of students too young to remember a world before the internet. I speak to them about times and situations that are recent in my relative memory, but are incomprehensible to them. They are, by and large, a generation of digital natives.
While it may be tempting to bemoan their over reliance on technology, or their lack of knowledge in doing things manually, this will be the same generation that saves the internet. They rely on it for most everything, and I sincerely doubt it will go anywhere under their watch.
Yes, this generation will use the internet differently than their predecessors. They will need to learn the healthy dose of skepticism that so many of us came in with. Not everything you read is true, be careful about who you trust, and so on. With that little bit of knowledge though, I’m excited to see what the internet will do next.
We like communities
If you remember the 20th century, you remember the pride that we took when something was locally-made, or locally-sourced. It felt great to see a stamp that something was ‘Made in the USA,’ or ‘Made in Canada’. Our minds equated something close to home as being something that was created with care, and with quality in mind.
That’s still the case, even in the world of the internet. We use our social networks all the time to search for ‘the best this,’ or ‘the best that’. We trust in the experiences of those closest to us. The same is true of reviews – our brains quickly sort through fluff and filler and look for those real life customer reviews so that we know who is like us that can speak from experience.
Without fact checking, we’ll likely lean on that sense of community even further. We’ll recognize how much fluff is clouding our online experience. Instead, we try even harder to find the human behind things. If we’re looking for a product or professional service, we don’t just want generic marketing spewed at us. We’ll want to know, more than ever before, how we can connect with the person behind it all.
Which leads me to…
We’ll always have stories
The truth is that we’ve been telling stories for thousands of years, before the internet was even a gleam in anyone’s imagination. From sitting around a campfire to the earliest days of print media to then radio and television and the movies, the things that stay with us have all revolved around the importance of a great story.
We remember facts from school, sure, but it’s the stories behind those facts that really stay with us. When you learn someone’s story, and you learn it in an engaging way that really resonates with you, it will stay so much longer than any other nonsense that tries to infiltrate our brains.
We already see this on social media. Professionals opening themselves up to a bit of personal vulnerability are the posts that resonate the most. We see it when we’re remembered for our stories, “hey you’re the guy/girl/person with the …” The truth is that we’re all existing in a crowded marketplace filled with way too much noise. It’s those stories that help us rise above the static.
The internet is here to stay
The internet is here to stay. So are you. So am I.
All of us will grow, and change, and evolve as technology does the same. That does not mean that we’re going anywhere.
In fact, I would argue that your story, and making your story stand out from everyone else’s, is more important today than ever before.
As the noise ramps up, work with a professional writer to help you be the clearest voice in the room.
Contact me today to get started.