Nostalgia for the old internet may just be generational preference

Evidence

There was a growing nostalgia for the “old internet,” with its serendipitous discovery and niche communities. In Wired, Kate Knibbs ascribed this shift to inevitable generational transition: Internet culture was a lot like Saturday Night Live, in which people preferred the content “they grew up with and watched during their formative years.” Gen Z’s fondness for surreal memes, like a blue Grinch bizarrely captioned “That Feeling When Knee Surgery Is Tomorrow,” underscored that maybe every new cohort of young people fundamentally loves content that is incomprehensible to older users. “Just because you aren’t having fun on the internet doesn’t mean the internet itself is broken,” she argued. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 706

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘each generation finds the next incomprehensible’ claim is the natural foil chapter for Marx’s own ‘internet is actually broken’ argument.
• XREF: connects to: Retromania stems from the economy, not just internet access to the past. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2312