The internet made us weird – just not in the right way | Douglas Rushkoff | Big Think

I feel like my undergraduate students, who are 18 to 22 years old, are maybe a bit more cynical about social media and their smartphones and all than we would have expected. I mean, they're cynical about everything, on a certain level. But I think that they're less likely to get hooked into some crazy idea and start following some conspiracy about George Soros or gun ownership or whatever it is—you know, those kinds of tunnels—than most adults. And partly, it's because they're CUNY students, and they don't have time. They're working. They're stuck, and that forces them to be grounded, on a certain level.

That said, this is the way they date, you know? They're swiping left and right on faces and all. And they're definitely products of the digital media environment in the way that they have real yes or no, thumbs up/thumbs down, like or not like relationships to things. I feel like that in-between place is really hard for them to inhabit. And that's the place that I grew up living for, you know? That strange place of, like, what does David Lynch mean in this scene? What the heck is going on here?

I live for that. I live for that weird uncertainty, to be in an optical illusion and where am I. That's not a place that I see them striving for, yearning for. You know, I see there's such a rush. There's such a time compression that their main experience of media—which seems to be digitally induced—is how long do I have to look at this before I can dismiss it. How do I wipe it away?

So you don't read a magazine to get into the magazine. You read a magazine, OK, I don't need that. I don't need that, don't need that, done. And then you can move on to the next thing. There isn't that sense of reveling. The digital future I imagined looked more like Rick Linklater's movie Slacker, where because I have the internet, I could get really into William Burroughs and Brion Gysin and Genesis P-Orridge and find weird culty groups and get more slack, not less slack.

Because I was able to type my paper on a Commodore 64 instead of sitting there on my Smith Corona, I have more time to veg out or to get stoned or to be weird. And it didn't happen like that. We didn't get the cognitive surplus that Clay Shirky told us about. Instead, they just filled it with more and more and more and more stuff so that there's a kind of a franticness and a harriedness that I don't remember us having at 18 to 22...