Coming of Age at the Dawn of the Social Internet | The New Yorker

That we straddle a pivotal moment in history being old enough to remember a time before the internet but also native enough to online culture to recognise and appreciate the whole new world of human interaction that the internet is only just beginning to open up. Many of us spent much of our late adolescence and early adulthood socialising online a... See more

To accomplish this goal, the “proud extroversion” of the early Web soon gave way to a much more homogenized experience: hundred-and-forty-character text boxes, uniformly sized photos accompanied by short captions, Like buttons, retweet counts, and, ultimately, a shift away from chronological time lines and profile pages and toward statistically opt... See more

The New Internet that's in question here probably began to coalesce in the early 2010s. At first, it emerged slowly, stewing in the public discontent that grew out of an increasingly powerful and extractive tech sector. Just as much as it was a professional stance, the reaction was a visceral one. Many users of the internet were beginning to notice

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