EFFIE BATEMAN | Lifestyle | Contact
A woman who often finds herself doomscrolling social media until the wee hours of the morning has today admitted she misses the days when she had absolutely no idea what was going on, and didn’t care, it’s reported.
As someone who couldn’t have told you who the Prime Minister of Australia was in 2015, Emma Manners, 32, says she’s now too aware of everything – including the privilege she had being able to be completely ignorant of politics and world events for most of her life.
Now, having had her eyes opened with the constant onslaught of information available to her on a handheld device, Emma says she often finds herself wistfully thinking about the early internet days when people seemed hopeful of the future of technology, there was some kind of weird viral challenge every month, and weird, racist comments were confined to 4chan and not in every comment section on social media.
“Harlem Shake, planking, the Mannequin challenge…god, we really had it good, didn’t we?”, says Emma, with a sad smile, “there was a real innocence to it all.”
“…well, sure, I did see a bloke shove a glass jar up his arse and a man get beheaded, thanks to Rotten.com.”
“But other than that, the internet just seemed like this fun, silly experiment!”
Emma says she went from being completely, blissfully ignorant to knowing too much.
“I live in fucking Betoota Ponds, there’s no reason why I should know so much about American politics. In another life, I could have reached the grand age of 86 without ever learning what a reciprocal tariff is.”
More to come.
