2 Decline, 2 Deviance
"Many people looked at the trends I presented and said, “Oh, the internet did this”. Maybe the internet killed the vibe by enabling mass surveillance—everyone’s afraid to be weird inside the digital panopticon, where all of your behaviors are recorded, uploaded, and permanently preserved. Or maybe the internet flattened culture by subjecting it to algorithmic curation. We can’t have nice things anymore because the computers won’t show them to us.
Both of these hypotheses are probably wrong, because the internet—at least, the internet as we know it today—simply showed up too late to be a plausible suspect. A majority of Americans didn’t get broadband until 2007. Instagram only launched in 2010, which was also the year that iPhones got a front-facing camera. So the transition from the 1990s to the 2000s, where we see many forms of deviance declining, is not really the transition from “pre-internet” to “post-internet”. That transition happened somewhere around 2012 when a majority of people got a smartphone, and long after most of these trends were already in motion."
Via
Ana Cristina Pratas