Blow up your TV; throw away your papers
Go to the country, build you a home
Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches
Try and find Jesus on your own….
Substitute "papers" with "smart phone", and it's still good advice even into the 21st century.
The Existential notion of our having the ultimate responsibility for our own choices has all but evaporated in contemporary society, an observation that was particularly reinforced the last time that I was seated on a jury and listened to a string of petty criminals describe the events leading to their arrests as things that "just happened". They saw themselves as passive performers in their own lives. They did not recognize that they had made choices that had resulted in the consequences that brought them before the bench.
I hear a similar lament from those who react to contrary words and thoughts as if they were violence. They are passive to the extent that they seek some overriding authority, such as government, to intervene and correct the world so it's aligned with what's comfortable to them. There is little awareness that people represent a variety of perspectives and personal experiences that shape world-view, and that these are to be negotiated with one's own and navigated as a normal part of life.
There is this lack of awareness about individual, moral agency, mainly as too many people are remote from history. The past is largely a mystery that is wrapped in some easy stereotypical color, shapes, and sounds that insufficiently represent the period. If an election doesn't go their way, if a bill comes due that they didn't expect, if their grandiose life plans are revealed to be un-realistic, then their reaction is emotional, sometimes violent, and often punishing. They don't seem to realize that our inherited history is driven as much by moments such as these as it is by moments of victory, success, or fulfillment.
One of the reasons that I enjoyed university was because it exposed me to new ideas, ones that sometimes caused me some angst, and revealed how rich the world is in experience and points of view. The early Internet, when weblogs were common and popular, gave me the same charge.
Now, universities seek brutally to enforce the idea that all should use the same words and share the same thoughts. The institution actively protects students from anything that would disrupt their fantastic, and well-programmed, sense of well-being. The Internet does the same, with far-reaching consequences for those who do not publicly repeat, or who dare to question, that which has been established as "The Truth". Never mind that The Truth changes rather quickly and whimsically.
What was it Auntie Mame said? Oh, yes. "Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death!" Contemporary universities and the "information super-highway" promote intellectual starvation.
It appears that I'm not the only one to notice:
I spend a lot of time online, and I find it useful, informative, infuriating, ecstatic, depressing, alarming, occasionally reassuring. There are set periods in the day when I’m off it completely, and then I listen to podcasts, or old radio shows, or listen to music. These are outside of the scrum of the Very Online People and they feel grounded, leisurely, paced to a sensible rhythm.
In other words, I behave as I choose, and the people who are complaining about the internet melting their sense of time are experiencing the result of what they have chosen. It may be that they are particularly susceptible to the firehose of information because they grew up knowing nothing else, or took to it because they had a BS gig in the “industry” that required them to write meaningless pieces about second-rate influencers or listicles or quizzes for BuzzFeed. This required them to take the vast quantity of meretricious nonsense on the internet seriously, and inflate its thin bodkin into something important.
Whatever the reason, they have done this to themselves with the tools at hand. It was not the only way the tools could be used.Heck, read the whole thing, if you wish. Also, the rest of the site gives one a flavor of what the Internet was once like, as the site was born in those more free-wheeling days.