Our parents warned us the internet would break our brains. It broke theirs instead.
/So many boomers that warned millennials to be careful on the internet seem to have forgotten all their own warnings. Their brains are broken, and that destruction is threatening to break our relationships, too.
There is so much content on the internet, and so much of it is bad. It is blasting in your face relentlessly. To navigate it well — to discern truth and lies, to parse one's own emotional and reflexive responses, to summon the mental energy to pay attention to credibility and incentives and the small, almost indescribable cues that might indicate whether a piece of content is to be trusted — is very difficult. It is especially difficult for those who have low digital literacy because they did not grow up using the internet.
Our parents' generation, no less than ours, was totally unprepared for the advent of digital technology and mass media … They've been sucked into their screens like the rest of us. They weren't physically abducted, as they feared we could be by a chatroom catfisher in 1999. But it can still feel like the people we know and love are gone.
Bonnie Kristan writing in The Week