I fear that social media will become the new normative for interaction on a daily basis as we get further and further through the generations, until we get to the point where everyone is at 3 generations separated from anyone who actually knows what it was like before times got like that.
Ironically, my stance on the internet has almost flipped in this boomer-like mentality. I remember the days of spending all my time on the computer, looking through forums, finding cool sites, and playing video games. It was the shit. My parents were a generation older than my friends parents, though, and would say all the classic stuff like "No one forms real connections online", "Computers are all fake stuff", "Go outside and play something real", "Go meet real people", all that stuff.
Nowadays... I say the same thing about social media...
I think that the difference is, though, back in my days, we still did go outside and play, meet real people, interact, do hobbies together, etc. These days, a lot of kids just stare at their phones. I know teens who, when they get together, they just sit in the same room and stare at their phones the whole time, occasionally letting out a laugh as someone drops a meme in their group chat. That's some real dystopian shit. I hate sounding like a boomer when I say, "Go outside, grab a stick, and hit your friend with it. That's what I did back in my days". It just reminds me of all the years my parents spent shitting on me for being so into computers (and how ironic their meltdown was when I dropped out of being a CS major to pursue becoming a construction business owner).
Is social media a bane? I think so. But I wonder if that's just because we haven't fully evolved to integrate it efficiently. There was a time where people felt about cars how they feel about social media. And its true, cars cause a lot more deaths and pollution than horse and buggies did, but... who would you talk to that says, "When will cars end? When will they go too far? Damn, Gen A is so reliant on cars, its sad to see that they don't know how to get anywhere without them...".
I'm so conflicted. Social media used to be looked down on as garbage for weirdo freaks who couldn't socialize. Now its normie and us weirdos look down on the normies for using it. What is the inevitable end point? Is there one? Will social media evolve into something new and we'll go through this exact same struggle all over again?
I won't say I'm much better, I use my smart phone all the time. I use GPS all the time. I don't have a physical phonebook, just my contacts list and DuckDuckGo. I use Discord. I use Telegram. Is the fact that those things don't make up my life what truly sets me apart? Is it the fact that I build tables and dice rollers for fun that sets me apart? Is it going on walks through my neighborhood without my phone that sets me apart from the previous gen and the new gen? Am I exactly like the boomers I was so against once upon a time? Are we exactly like the boomers who talked down to us and blamed us for the social decline we were experiencing? Are we just too egotistical to realize that we are becoming/have become the very thing we hated and tried so hard to avoid becoming?
So what if social media becomes the way people communicate? What if that evolves humanity further than it ever has been? We see the bad now, sure. When things first start, there's always bad. We look back at the introduction of electricity into society as a good thing, but what if it wasn't? What if people looked at electricity exactly as we look at social media now?
On another note, too, what if social media collapses? So much industry is based on social media right now. What if social media is a bubble and it pops? That is what truly worries me, I think. Imagine the dystopian nightmare if, in some hypothetical situation, we suddenly lost all our ability to use phones and computers. Look at how people are acting when they think they have to be locked in their house all the time? Riots, murder, chaos, mental breakdowns. Now, imagine this situation, but you take away a normies access to Twitter, Facebook, their texts, their calls and contact book. Me, that's another day, but for some that's their whole existence. We might see a collapse like we've never seen before and, between that and a future where social media is everything... I'm really not sure which future is worse. We can recover from both, in the same way, but they both have devastating prospectives.