Growing Old Online

When I can't sleep, I put the app back on my phone. I try to hurt my own feelings and I am successful. I want someone to hurt me or I want someone to be wrong. The internet is for that.

The point at which I get enough of what I want to do is when I see a message on my phone that says I am old. It targets a group of people and makes fun of them for being online at a certain age. I got into a snarly little snit of indignance, and then I got mad at myself for getting mad, and then I deleted the app and went to bed.

Everyone is going to have to hear about the fact that young people are getting older. We know how to make it everyone's problem. I used to feel like I knew who was on which team. I knew who was old online, who was young, and who was making the jokes. The categories have changed in the last few years

As we reach a series of page breaks, the hierarchy in online social spaces is changing, with the oldest of the younger generation turning 40. The clothes we wore the first time around are in retro fashion for teens and young adults who weren't alive yet for Y2K.

Young people are getting older online every day. The first generation to have been young on social media and to get older there is the current generation known as the "millennia". We may have been online for more than two decades, going through more stages of a life cycle than anyone else yet has. Some people have been here before but not when they were younger.

The internet felt like the future when I first started using it. The early days of social media had nothing to do with family, careers, or polite visible life. It was always 2 am on the internet after someone's parents went to sleep. The internet was different to what our parents were used to. It was not for the elderly. A preteen thinks that old people meant anyone over 25.

My experience of social media, and that of many people around my age, was predicated on making fun of our parents and people who didn't know what the internet was or how to act on it. My dad used to tell me that his dad kept asking who Mr. Jones was, even though he didn't know it was him. Our parents couldn't comprehend the internet's music. Sometimes a friend's parent would open an AOL account, and all of us would shriek with laughter, because we knew it was an old person. It was the funniest joke on the planet.