Can I ask what you're basing that assertion on? The article makes it sound as if they were indeed referring to the internet in general: "46% said they would rather be young in a world without the internet altogether."
[1] And how is call that new video thing? TikTakToe?
But it was less stressful at the same time. The shared reality was the 6 pm news. No endless conspiracy theories.
It's like when people say they want to go back to victorian values (of society at large) and forget that pre-dates antibiotics and anaesthesia. These people regret the socialised problems of being connected, misinformation at scale, loss of agency and genuine face-to-face communication and yearn for a simpler childhood. All well and good, but there's baby/bathwater latent in this.
There was a time when it was a big series of tubes.
It gets worse in poorer countries, where ISPs made deals with Facebook (ever wondered why some Indians are not able to google? Because google costs money, facebook groups doesn't). Additionally, whole infrastructures run on WhatsApp. In those regions you'll see WhatsApp numbers on container ships, trains, harbor buildings, factories etc because it's easier than maintaining a website for that.
(Edit: see my comment about internet.org)
The younger generation only uses smartphones because parents cannot afford to pay for both a laptop and a smartphone. Ask any teacher about that, they'll easily confirm this.
The problem we're facing is the overproprietarization of the internet. What we see as an internet where we can find information and learn about things, they see misinformation, propaganda, toxic shitstorms, and distraction. Even youtube has gone to shit, what started out as a new way to access knowledge in an entertaining way its early days.
And it's not only that, you can't even point kids to a safe website that will give them only links to learn/study about topics they're interested in, because google meanwhile has fully embraced its evil side of corporate greed that even the founders knew about was morally a conflict of interest in the beginning.
A lot of countries are thinking about banning smartphones from schools for this very reason. We (as a society) built apps so morally and uncontrollably bad that we created a whole generation of kids with self-induced ADHD, and now we're wondering why we have an education and therapy crisis.
Duh.
This is absolutely wrong. FB did that in SE Asia. But in India, this led to the creation of IIRC Internet Freedom Foundation which fights for Internet freedom to this day and established a strong foundation for net neutrality . FB tried to destroy net neutrality in India and failed.
But the broader point stands. Whatsapp, Youtube, Sharechat …etc., is internet for a huge percentage of the population.
FB to this date still owns the internet.org domain, which was literally their marketing at the time. Free plans from mobile carriers had/have access to a few selected websites and not the rest of the real internet.
While I agree that the courts decided against this at some point, it was around 13+ years too late, because a generation of mobile users got hooked already.
Meta even went as far as deleting their internet.org website from the web archive, all years result in a 404 now. Interesting.
Interesting to learn. In China, mobile carriers also have similar deals with huge content providers. You can buy data plans with a discounted rate specifically for several YouTube, Netflix, and TikTok like apps.
6Az4Mj4D•3h ago
clipsy•3h ago