Everything on the computer that is from the internet, including my new version of Mojave OS is different. There are more layers of permission required, some of which are impossible because they demand a cell phone and I'm on landline. Many assumptions about what everyone has become limit the programs, which are written by bi-coastal, young, urban, narrowly educated, mostly males. If you don't share their assumptions, you're excluded. This is a marketing mistake and excludes many older folks with pocketbooks. If they are hoping that their point of view is going to be popular enough to make them rich and famous, they are mistaken.
Another loop is that when I lost access to Twitter and even to my blog, people sent comments as a way of getting into contact. It was touching that they worried. But since I didn't have computer access, I had no way to even know anything was sent until just now when I occurred to me they might have evaded the change in my email name. (It was prairiem@3rivers.net but now it is mscriver@3rivers.net.) They had been recorded by blogger. But at least half of them were anonymous and I will not publish and may not respond to anonymous posts. There was a bit of spam, some in Vietnamese. One lady wanted to scold me for not talking about nuns on the rez. The only one I ever knew about was Sister Edna in Heart Butte, who was Bishop Hunthausan's sister, which is why they have a big new church complex. He served Helena for many years.
More and more the "social media" are controlling what is posted, partly to guide people into what they want us to buy, see, or respond to and partly to avoid bad actors, like Russian fakes. (Which really means to avoid lawsuits.) At present I'm suspended from Twitter in addition of having the wrong kind of telephone.
I find I resent all this. Even Pages has a spell checker that grabs and changes what I write. It's bad enough fighting my skippy brain.
But even more sadly, the websites like Medium or TED started out offering access to everyone in the belief that many suppressed creators would suddenly leap into action and provide amazing free content. They didn't. Clearly, everyone wants to write and no one wants to read, which is maybe why they produce a lot of dreck. One learns high standards for writing by reading quality work, but the "bi-coastal, young, urban, narrowly educated, mostly males" can't even name quality work. The high schools who used to name them because everyone always did are not up to the job.
Both TED and Medium are middle-class oriented, re-cycling assumptions over and over. YouTube cooking tips and pet vids.
Anyway, the standards have changed. The taboos have changed. (Not gone.) The jargon and social mores have changed. I finally got tired of "West Wing" and skipped to the last episode so I could stop. The story and characters were about the "educated managerial class" that pretended everyone was like them, living in temporary digs, sleeping around, getting drunk, making sex jokes, and references to the movies most people used to watch.
I want a parallel internet that stays simple, in the present, intelligible.
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