I fill a significant portion of my spare time with
dumb thoughts that strangers post online. I’ve
been on the internet since the late-aughts, spending
after-school screen time with Fred videos and
Webkinz, floating from site to site on the family PC.
The online world allowed me to be anonymous —
even though I met “friends” on Club Penguin chats
and GirlsGoGames comments, I was just a chaotic
username, not Annie Rauwerda. My bubble of
anonymity popped when my dad told me that the
public comments I’d made on High School Musical
videos (“Vanessa Hudgens is sooooo perfect for
Zac,” etc.) were all associated with his name and
that I should “please not do that.”
I spent my middle school years under my actual
name on Google Buzz and Facebook, poking
and posting. By high school, the tech giants had
hooked me on algorithmically-curated content.
The 10-year anniversary of my Instagram account
approaches, and I’m not sure if I should celebrate
or mourn.
The internet hosts mazes of feverish
connection; it takes our social incentives (to
be liked) and disguises them as performance
incentives (to get likes.) After I meet someone in
real life, I search their name on the internet to get a
read on their vibe — a habit that, when I take a step
back, seems deranged. Why can’t my perception
of a person be complete without knowing their
online presence? In a digitally-mediated world, it’s
easy to make life inextricable from social media.
Many of the good and beautiful parts of life— the
jokes, the inspiration, our communities and our
families— are inseparable from the internet, too.
People I’ll never meet are saying nothing and
saying it all the time, and I’m frequently sucked
into the abyss, viewing it all from my digital
peephole. Opaque algorithms present me with
curated content that updates every few seconds;
apps send me FOMO-inducing push notifications
when I haven’t logged on in a while. Occasionally,
the trash vortex yields something useful, like
this Chrome extension that hides pop-ups and
long personal stories from food blogs. Other
times, I’m absent-mindedly scrolling through
acquaintances’ vacation pictures, wasting my
time watching their carefully constructed lives.
A stranger made a Rube Goldberg machine.
Another stranger had a gender reveal at a ski
resort (she’s a girl). More strangers had a reunion
at an airport, and I watched until the end. I’m
happy for them. Hong Kong now has a meme
museum.
I become invested in the day’s happenings and
I move to the couch to continue my scroll.
Female octopuses throw things at males that
are harassing them and a stranger thinks this is
pretty hashtag girlboss. Now there’s shaved soap,
a close-up of gloved hands popping blackheads
and a picture of a frog that says “I live in Poland
but the la is silent.” An ad for a bank for gay people.
A mukbang. My brother’s ex-girlfriend did a
Tough Mudder with her dad who has cancer and
my high school nemesis is asking her followers to
join her pyramid scheme. Vaccine disinformation.
A cow got stuck in a tree. Someone changed their
Tinder location to the Olympic Village and is
matching with Olympians. Neat!
There’s a gif of a rapper above an Amber
Alert above a deep-fried-meme above a notice of
neighborhood raccoons above ASMR cooking
tutorials above viral recipes for air-fryer tofu
above a stranger’s açaí bowl above a 5-year-
old opening a neon slime kit. Rapper Nicki
Minaj spreads misinformation, claiming that
the COVID-19 vaccine caused infertility in her
cousin’s friend, and reputable sources rush to
correct her. My high school assistant swim coach
marks herself safe from a minor hurricane. The
New York Times Magazine ran an article about
how to catch a bat, making me wonder if this is
a skill I’ll ever need to know. There’s an ad for a
dating app for dogs.
Rudy Giuliani is on Cameo. An influencer posted
a picture in Cabo but when she photoshopped her
small waist, she inadvertently made her thumb
really fat. Timothée Chalamet was spotted eating
a sandwich. The Daily Mail puts out another
bizarre headline: “EXCLUSIVE: Tech bro boasts
about hanging with ‘notable celebrities and execs’
at UNOFFICIAL Burning Man as rich kids bring
their own stages, Porta Potties and DJ equipment
to Black Rock Desert ‘Playa.’” A Russian content
farm on Facebook asks if you can name a song that
mentions the weather, and your parents’ next-door
neighbor comments “It’s Raining Men.” I suppose
she’s right, and I take a screenshot to send to my
brother but never get around to sending it. A girl
I met at a slumber party in eighth grade moved
to Texas with her boyfriend. A BuzzFeed video
shows how street lights work. Polka-dot bralettes
are on sale. Bugs Bunny is wearing a tux and
wishing “all darty-ers a very calm down it’s 9 in
the morning.” A church youth pastor says that the
new rec room has everything a teen could want:
Blu-rays, a foosball table, a board game shelf and
several types of potato chips. Someone posted a
video of their “obnoxiously strong toes” and it met
my (admittedly low) expectations.
“Ali express is a beautiful name for a girl,” says
a stranger. A multi-millionaire I’ve never heard of
is quitting his job at a one-billion-dollar company
to work at a different billion-dollar company, and
a cat fell off the upper bowl of a stadium during
a football game. Someone brings up the guy
with two penises from Reddit. Someone thinks
their chin looks like the city of Dallas. It does.
Another meme arises based on a nostalgic form
of children’s entertainment that people in their
twenties enjoyed as elementary schoolers. A
stretched, saturated stock image of Paris Hilton
holding a massive Hello Kitty purse is overlaid by
glowing yellow text that reads “I am so based.” It
has 60,000 likes. Someone in a Twitter argument
says “touch some grass,” an insult implying that
one has lost touch with reality so entirely that they
must interact with a plant and reflect on their
actions.
Like a lab rat with a lever, I wade through
endless content in search of a meme that induces a
strong exhale. I don’t know if the mess of content
adds up to anything, but I do know it feels thrilling
on good days and overwhelming on bad days.
There are plenty of voices saying social media is
bad — just as critics warned about TV (called a
“vast wasteland” in 1961), or the once-newfangled
concept of the written word, which Plato said
would “implant forgetfulness.”
As someone who loves the way the media
landscape always provides something new to
learn, I don’t mean to be a Luddite. Still, when
I don’t set limits, I find myself exhausted by
it all. I mourn the way it can fuel hate groups,
decimate mental health and pressure its users
into constant performance. Huge concerts may
have a stage in the middle surrounded by seating
in every direction, but on social media, it’s as if the
performers are in the stands and there’s no stage
— we’re performing for no one but each other.
I have my gripes with the internet, of course,
but I keep coming back to it for several reasons:
I frequently find things I really like (like this
101-year-old lobsterwoman) and it connects me
to my friends. Gen Z has been dubbed “digital
natives” because we grew up in close contact with
the internet. The term implies the internet is my
home country, and it sure feels like it: I speak our
shared language of memes and phrases with a
certain dialect, and I get a homesick longing for
content if I go for too long without it.
The other day, I saw in an online article linked
from social media that ducks can learn to say
phrases, and one said “you bloody fool.”
“Maybe I am,” I thought, and then I scrolled to
a tweet from user @afraidofwasps. It read: “You
only live once — you should try to spend as much
time on the computer as possible. After you die,
you won’t have access to it anymore.”
Wednesday, September 22, 2021 // The Statement — 2
Design by Erin Shi
BY ANNIE RAUWERDA,
STATEMENT CORRESPONDENT
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