Internet reeeeepting

Perhaps I’m getting old, so let’s review,
Birth of me: 1983
My first computer: 1990 (Amstrad PPC512, in case you were wondering)
Birth of commercial internet proper: circa 1995Learning that man learns nothing from the past not studied: ongoingThat’s right, boys and girls, I was alive in a world before the Internet, in a world where Windows came on about 20 floppy disks (that weren’t) and games came on 3 or 4 floppy disks (that were).I saw the birth of the internet, grew to both love and hate the sound of the 14.4k (that’s kilobits per second, people) modem, lived in fear of someone picking up the phone, and saw the birth of the much loathed html blink tag.But now, as a true veteran of the internet, I am beginning to see things come around that have been before. You may be a little, young dear, reader to remember some of these things, but some years ago there was a massive farcical campaign to stop the use of Dihydrogen Monoxide in all sorts of products. Apart from being something that any student that has passed high school should be able to recognise as the formal chemical formula for water, there have been e-mails from companies that have sworn that they do not use that “chemical” in their all natural products, or that they discharge any amount of it into rivers or the sea.
My main problem is not with the massive lack of education of the general populous who have gone through the education system, but that these same people have not learnt from massive internet trolling that has come around only years before.Nor is this the only example of the repeating trend. I am amazed that there are still people who believe that there is a one-day-only (no date provided) sale on ray bands with 90% off. And that if you type “7” after sharing something on Facebook, that an amazing thing will happen to the static picture that you just shared. Worse than that, I have actually seen this post grow in real time: it grew to fill up two pages worth of scrolling before I was forced to de-friend the person in question or lose my general sanity.So what is it that causes people to lose all sense of memory when it comes to the wide world of Facebook? Is it perhaps the constant flow of information of websites like this, that almost require you to have knowledge that is a mile wide but only an inch deep? Is it just that we have replaced Google as our repository for knowledge and instead focused on the pleasure of the trifling and fleeting?I have often been told that my memory is unusual, that most people don’t remember things in the same way I do. Perhaps this is what I am noticing, merely on a grander level. But perhaps, to quote from memory from a TV program,
“‘Nowadays, kids have got all these diseases, ADD, ADHD. In my day, kids were just stupid.
‘What’s wrong with my kid?’‘Oh, him? He’s stupid. Next!’”
Are we all just suffering from stupid? Are we suffering from the google era? I mean, I’m all for self-driving cars, but is it at the cost of our intellect? We are already starting to see memes of possible future wedding vows using emotes as part of the wedding ceremony, of brides and grooms not kissing without first snapchatting the moment. Or is it just that stupid people finally have a massive voice that the rest of us must suffer through?

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