In 2020, when I was around twelve, the pandemic struck. Online school days were six hours, so I sat in front of the computer for six hours or more. At its best, this led to me making some of the closest friends I’ve had, but on the other hand, my social media addiction began. My drugs of choice were Reddit, Tumblr, and Quora.
As the other pages on my website suggest, my life revolves around an interest in art and books, which social media has been the bane of. For one, it drastically erodes one’s attention span. “Too long, didn’t read” is a classic phrase dropped by netizens when confronted with something longer than one paragraph—it’s (understandably) more easy and fun, after all, to deluge one’s mind in light and color than strain your mind with serious thinking. Social media makes us constantly seek new sensations, emotions, more sounds and sights, even if they’re pointless, just for the sake of numbing the mind. When they don’t give us those, we get bored. A friend of mine often watches six videos at once while playing video games; just one year ago, he’d recommended me Les Misérables, a 1,400-page novel about France, morality, and class struggles. He isn’t able to read much nowadays. I don’t want to find “walls of text” daunting as he must now, but entertaining and challenging.
While social media exposes you to many new people and things, at the end of the day, it almost never truly teaches you anything; it doesn’t really help you grow as a person. Something you notice about people who spend too much time online is that they have relatively little to say about their personalities—they don’t build cool things, ramble about history, play sports, make music, read, fish, explore. At most, they will have a few favorite bands or video games, or strong (but useless) political opinions influenced by an echo chamber. This is because social media provides enough entertainment for them, delight is served to them on a silver platter; they have no need to explore nor deepen their sense of personality or creativity to have fun.
There is a Vietnamese saying which goes, “Close to ink then you are dark, close to light then you are bright.” Even if you dislike how many people act on Reddit, Twitter, etc., simply dwelling around their users enough will abase you to think just like them. Through hundreds of hours of scrolling, I emptied my mindset of books and art, replacing them with terms and phrases like “based”, “redpilled”, “Reddit moment”, “tradwife”, “soyjak”, and so on. Although I’d been too proud to consider myself a Redditor, all this scrolling had made their opinions, impressions, worldviews, and slang had slowly become mine. Moreover, I’d scroll endlessly, and suddenly realize it was 1 a.m. and the house was silent, and fill with shame and self-disgust; only to come crawling back the next day. If that wasn’t chronically online, what is? And when I had my first online argument... that was a turning point for me. I realized how I’d let myself become.
Things could’ve been different. At that moment, there was also a nineteen-year-old, world-famous pianist named Alexander Malofeev. He was a fellow zoomer, but was out there performing in some of the most prestigious music competitions in the world. He was making history. How? Well, for one, he didn’t bother catching up on online drama...
I think there is a difference between having a life online and being chronically online. On one hand, one can “live online” by scrolling on TikTok for nine hours a day, consuming endlessly and mindlessly to fill the emptiness inside. On the other hand, one can use the Internet to simply find others with common interests, or form friendships. Nowadays, I mostly try to stay on forums, friends’ Discord servers, or this website. (Once in a while, people D.M. me because they find my website interesting.)
Neocities does have a system of likes and followers, and it can waste your time just as much as anything else, but I don’t think its effects are as bad as other social media. Most of the writing on here is longer, more personal, and less sensationalistic. Also, there is much more emphasis on individual creation and expression. Most social media only allow you to upload a profile picture, a banner, and a short biography, but on Neocities, everything is based on personality—from the way websites are organized, coded, and updated, to the way they’re decorated and what they hold. And because of this, making a website needs a lot more effort than simply clicking "Like" buttons below images; it requires both knowledge in coding and a sense of creativity.
Thank you for your interest. On a final note (and I may sound like an old woman for this), it’s a little depressing to see the world around me becoming more engrossed in social media as I make every effort to get away from it. At my school, for example, when the teachers aren’t speaking, the class is almost always dead silent, and everyone’s looking at their phones, scrolling and scrolling. I just hope they’re able to manage their usage better than I was... Admittedly, there are some good sides to social media, but from what I’ve seen, most people who’ve stayed on them long enough grow to hate them.
Page created March 7, 2024. Last updated July 1, 2024.