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What does living living life through Internet mean ?
The covid hit the world in late 2019 and with that came drastic changes in the lives of everyone around the world — i.e. the whole world had to be in lockdown and with that came the dependence on the internet for 2 whole years. It certainly had some toll on people's mental health being locked up inside their homes for that long and usage of the internet as their primary source of socialization.
With the pandemic came ‘new normality that the people around the world had to be online either for work, socializing, or studies. . An additional 782 million people came online in just two years since 2019 – more than twice the population of the United States and over 80% of Ontarians were involved in at least one internet-related activity. This new normality has caused a different sort of situation where it can be described as a lot of people have become out of touch with the reality of real life.
This situation may be described as being chronically online .”It can be described to those people who spend so much time online it skews their sense of reality and hinders their ability to effectively communicate about topics like politics or social justice because they lack real-world experience.” says Abrar Al-Heeti in her article for CNET.
The way being online has caused people not only cause people to not how to properly communicate with people but also have a distorted version of reality that they perceive is not remotely how real life works and is harmful in many ways, especially to marginalized people like - women, POC, immigrants, black people, and disabled folks. Internet activism is far different from the realities and the struggles that they face in real life.
We can see a lot of tweens and teens face this throughout the internet while they were quarantined in one of their prime ages to socialize, build their personality and have a social circle. This will be harmful to them in the long run as it will have serious consequences while they have to socialize with people offline and it could lead to them being isolated or having social anxiety. Why I want to highlight being chronically online is that comes from personal experience of being sunk into the chronically online discourse that has nothing to contribute to society or me personally, the year pandemic started I used to be chronically online on Twitter with my online friends referred to on Twitter as “rooms'' the acronym being “one of my mutual” having discourse on the app about the most ridiculous things that doesn't add value to anything in anyone of parties involving. It really is like endorphins and serotonin on the palm of your hands when things are going your way and like all things that seem too good, this takes a toll on one’s mental health. As I became more present on the internet I became less and less sociable with the outside world. It became my reality when I realized how toxic one gets being online for too long so, I quit social media for the good of my own mental health.
Sending death threats over an opinion, doxing someone, and stalking someone’s account history have become the reality of people online, and don't think it’s weird to know every detail about them. And after the pandemic, more and more people have become accustomed to the internet as a socializing lifestyle. Sure, the internet has its pros and it has helped many friends and family stay in touch during the pandemic but we also have a whole mental health crisis that has occurred during the pandemic. We have been accustomed to being bombarded with so much information from the internet and the information doesn’t even get processed before we get a new one. And also the content that we consume for fun really has shortened our attention span tremendously.
All in all, my reason for even being this article is that a lot of people engage in discourse with nameless, faceless trolls or users on the internet and it doesn’t necessarily bring value and is a waste of time. Social anxieties also manifest due to being on the social media sphere
The TikTok video talks about how beauty has become more prevalent in this era of the internet and how we are not supposed to see this many beautiful people in a lifetime. Especially if you are a woman or someone who identifies as a woman the worth indirectly is equivalent to your beauty and when the beauty standard this world follows is the Eurocentric beauty standard then it is a losing game. So, the way being chronically online is harmful overall to all of us in one way. A tale as old as time comes true comes to my mind “too much sweet is bitter”. So, let us be a little less dependent on the internet and maybe touch some grasses — in real life of course.