Will the End of Lockdowns Change Our Relationship with the Internet?

Last year author Sonia Shah predicted that after pandemic-induced lockdowns finally ended, 'The hype around online education will be abandoned, as a generation of young people forced into seclusion will reshape the culture around a contrarian appreciation for communal life.'

This week the Atlantic's technology staff writer is now suggesting that 'As the stress of the pandemic is beginning to recede, our relationship with the internet might be renegotiated...'

As vaccination rates tick up, and IRL social life resumes, it's getting easier to imagine that we're on the brink of something big: a coordinated withdrawal from swiping and streaming, a new consensus that staying home to watch Netflix is no longer a chill Friday-night plan, but an affront. Could this be real? Are we about to start the summer of a Great Offlining...?

A few signs that this movement could be upon us: Netflix reported its worst first quarter in eight years, after seeing historic growth in 2020. Tinder conceded that more than half of its Gen Z users have no intention of using its videochat features ever again. Clubhouse downloads dropped significantly in April, prompting worry that the app was always just 'a temporary salve to being stuck inside.'

On The Cut, Safy-Hallan Farah has predicted a post-pandemic future in which our culture prioritizes, among other things, 'earnestness,' 'communism,' and 'being extremely offline.' The writer Luke Winkie forecasts a 10-week period of everyone abandoning the internet, adding that 'offline is going to hit like a drug.' Discourse's Patrick Redford put it best, writing that 'the idea of further screen-only interaction with my friends and loved ones after a year overstuffed with them makes me want to toss my phone into the Pacific Ocean....'

[B]ut it's hard to imagine that a Great Offlining is really in the cards. Instead, we could be heading for a Great Rebalancing, where we reconfigure how we do our work and how we organize our time on the internet. We've grown more aware of how we rely on one another — online as well as off — and of the tools we have or could build for responding to a crisis. The biggest tech companies' accrual of power remains one of the most serious problems of my lifetime, but I no longer talk about the internet itself as if it were an external and malignant force, now that I've lived in such intimate contact with it for so long.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.