Internet everything

In our day and age, everyone is aware of the internet, from

grandparents to parents to baby cousins. Older generations are more wary
of it and younger generations embrace it with open arms; reveling in its
novelty. Parents love to blame it for various things and teens love to defend
it. Like everything else, it's silly to assign something just one label. It just
exists in the world and it's our job to give it our meaning. To blame the
amorphous thing that is the internet and social media without looking at
ourselves with accountability and responsibility is irrational.

It’s a difficult thing to define words, especially the internet. To use only a
handful of adjectives to describe something so vast, to capture all its
nuances. We all have a basic idea of what it is; from trashy articles
speculating on conspiracy theories to five-hour-long video essays to a
tweet about how slurs are okay. To be literal, it could be described as a
network connecting devices from around the world. And in a more personal
sense, it’s an extension of our lives.

My generation views the internet and social media as a second life. We

broadcast our lives, all our complicated human feelings on display for
anyone with a device to see. Carelessly archiving our lives, not caring what
our digital footprint looks like. Everything that happens on the internet feels
as real as the things that happen in our physical lives.

It's reductive and correct to say thinking the internet is purely a safe place
is stupid. Thinking such a vast platform doesn't have its dangers is absurd.
Everything you could think of and more you couldn't even comprehend is
on the internet. Good and bad, for better or worse.

It has to be taken into account that social media doesn't reflect reality. It's
an imitation of it; whether it's a dystopia or a perfect paradise. Most don't
want people to think badly of them. So they curate their whole existence
and only show the best parts, acting like the worst bits of it don't exist. Then
people see these ideas of perfection and get fooled by reality, the standard
to meet. We see all the good and think it's all ever good while experiencing
every second of our bad moments. anger, jealousy, and envy fester, and so
does insecurity. No one is immune to propaganda and this could be
compared to it. The propaganda of perfection.

This culture of perfectionism poisons us. People speak in heavily edited

formats and we think that’s how people talk. There is merit to it, to think
before you speak but that doesn't delegitimize the harm it causes. We
delude ourselves into believing mistakes are shameful, wrong things and
forget that we are human. People who are born to make mistakes and learn
from them.

On the internet, it’s easy to be fooled, to have our ideals changed.

Everyone is given a voice to say what they want or what they believe in.
And sometimes what people say isn’t right or healthy. Things are
conspiracy theories, race theories and much more. Pseudoscience tries to
explain that the earth is flat. Food bloggers sell you their diet and nutrition
supplements that will let lose fat and convince you that being fat is a
disease. That you should be ashamed of yourself if you are and you should
try to do anything to not be. Anyone can say anything and anyone can see
it. We have to interact with the internet with strong morals.

Our social circles have gotten exponentially bigger with the development of
the internet. Before the internet age, we only had neighbours as peers.
Now our social circles include almost everyone on the globe with a device
and an internet connection. Naturally, we compare ourselves to our peers,
now we can do that to people who live in entirely different circumstances
than us. Comparing ourselves to celebrities and royals, people we were
never supposed to do that with. People whose job it is to seem perfect.

The internet is a lot of things. It’s everything the world is and beyond that. It
has everything, it's wonderful and dreadful all at once. It has as much
potential for bad as it does good. It’s irrational to say it's all bad or good, it’s
so much simpler to put things into neat little boxes. But it's our responsibility
to interact with it like we do life, with a grain of salt and a bucket of caution.
But not to dismiss it, to embrace all its quirks and difficulties. For it is an
extension of our lives, a tool.