Less heavy but not unheavy, I’ve been trying to think of words to frame some of the issues caused by our collective obsession with social media and its consequences. (1)
The first relevant term I learned, personally, was “future shock.” Roughly, it’s the state where people suffer emotional distress because everything is changing so fast! I suspect we’ve all felt it: that moment when, at work, something changes. So, you’ve got to abandon your expertise with the previous system for something else, which is often riddled with bugs, and just when you’re getting good with the new one, bang, they change it again. It can also be felt with the rapid rise and subsequent fall of social media networks – or just their sheer proliferation – as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and others compete in the same crowded space. And, lately, I’ve been seeing the final stage of future shock: the kids have it. Much of the discourse against gen AI is from young people who are seeing their futures stripped away by the rise of the AI shoggoth, its tentacles into everything.
Continue reading The Lexicon of Terms to Discuss Online Hyperreality and Hypernormalization