I understand, that the grammar in the headline above, which my editor picked for this column, might be ambiguous.
“Did Social Media Kill the Web… or Was It Us?”
Grammatically, you could interpret this two ways.
“Did Social Media Kill the Web… or Was It Us… that Killed It?”
or…
“Did Social Media Kill the Web… or Was it Us… that Got Killed?”
Both are perfectly respectable questions. But I intend to focus on the first interpretation. “Did we kill the Web, or is Social Media to blame?”
The second question — that social media killed us — is too depressing, with only one cup of coffee so far this morning.
But why are we even talking about killing? There’s entirely too much violence in the world.
Also, too much hyperbole.
For one thing, the Web is not dead. It wasn’t killed, not by Social Media, nor by us. This very humor column —which, as far as I know, appears only on the Web and not anywhere on social media — is proof that the Web is alive and well.
Well yes, okay… at least we can say, “alive”… even if it’s not “well”.
But I can certainly understand why people would claim that the Web has been killed, by social media. Young people, who will be running this joint in the not-too-distant future, now get their news largely from Instagram and TikTok and the rest of the social media sites… and they do their shopping using phone apps, instead of using web browsers the way people were meant to shop.
Young people watch movies on their phones. They track their exercise, listen to music, pay their bills, find routes and locations… And did I mention, shopping?
The shopping part is actually something we didn’t expect to see happen on the Web, back in the 1990s when we were using Netscape Navigator and the Web was infected with ugly colors and hard-to-read fonts. The Web was barely functional, compared to current phone apps and social media sites.
When Amazon came along in 1994, as an online bookstore hosted by Jeff Bezos’ in his garage, I honestly didn’t notice. The Web would never become a marketplace… or so I thought. Any product photo any bigger than a postage stamp took forever to load.
But maybe I wasn’t as smart as Jeff Bezos. I’m willing to consider that possibility.
And as we consider possibilities — for example, that the Web is not actually dead, yet — we have the company called ‘Neuralink’. Billionaire Elon Musk has funded this startup, with the idea of implanting electronic devices into people’s brains, so you will no longer need to wonder where you left your phone.
The prototype — which was tested on pigs and monkeys — got installed in the first human subject in January.
The only problem, I imagine, is the necessity to stay close to a wall socket.
Will Neuralink kill social media? Once we’re all hooked up to the internet inside our brains, will we finally — finally — be done with ‘scrolling’? Maybe I will simply ‘think’ about an Instagram Friend and be able to see what he’s have been up to lately. Oh, I see. He’s picking his toenails. It will be almost like real life.
Or I can ‘think’ about my next humor column, and an AI assistant will write it for me. That would be convenient.
A friend and I were talking about this new development the other day, and she asked me if I would allow a Neuralink to be implanted in my brain.
I was surprised by the question, but even more surprised, at myself, because I didn’t have a ready ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer.
Am I ready to let them open my skull, to help kill social media? Maybe I am.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.