The Internet Generation and Why It's Actually Pretty Great

This country has seen its fair share of civil unrest. We’re a relatively new nation - I’d say we’re still going through our rebellious teenage phase at this point, and have been going through it for roughly two hundred years. We had that experimental phase with slavery; the resulting fallout, harsh breakup, and consequent make-up between the north and south; that silly little “women’s suffrage” thing; and the whole “civil rights” scuffle we had to deal with in the sixties. The thing is: those haven’t been the only moments of national outrage - there have been so, so many more of them, but they quickly fizzled out, or were quenched, and were later entirely forgotten.

At first, the death of Mike Brown seemed like just another one of them - but then, amazingly. It wasn’t. Why not?

Because of the internet generation.

The internet is one of the most interesting social experiments our world has ever seen. For the first time in history, anyone can talk to anyone, and any information or opinions can be seen by millions of people with the touch of a button. There are some disappointing outcomes of course, and some scary ones, but since the police brutality in Ferguson, we’ve seen an amazing new side of the internet that no one had expected.

See, the craziest part of the Ferguson events isn’t the murder of Mike Brown. It isn’t even the rubber bullets and sound cannons and the tear gas. The event in Ferguson that seemed to strike most of its onlookers was the way the police responded to reporters.

The craziest part is when the police stopped allowing official members of the press to enter the area, and only let out “official” police reports to mainstream news. And when journalists had to bravely venture into the chaos and report through twitter or independent blogs. And when videos on youtube of the police shooting at peaceful protestors started getting taken down. And when police actually dismantled a reporter’s camera. And, finally, when a reporter caught a police officer shouting, “Get that light off. Get the fuck out of here, or you're getting shot with this!” on film.

The Internet generation is also the Hunger Games generation. We fawn over dystopian novels with nationwide obsession. Why? Mainly, it’s because we identify with it. There’s a lot of hyperbole of course, and more hovercars and spaceships, maybe, but the problems at its core - the flaws in the fictional governments - are the same ones ours have, but on a grander, more easily recognizable scale. People in power controlling and censoring the media, higher classes violently oppressing the lower classes, some form of hideous racism, entrapping the civilians in a life they can’t escape. They’re all played up in a consumable way - not like the subtle, insidious way they usually appear in real life - so we can identify with them from a comfortable, glamorized distance. We like that. We like to get riled up about things that hit home but still don’t really apply to us.

But once in a while, something like this happens, and it’s so familiar, because we’ve read about it hundreds of times. No one ever reads the Hunger Games and thinks, gosh, what if we were to put our own children against each other in real life one day? But then you see Ferguson, and you think of all the other parts of the Hunger Games - the police brutality, the silencing and censoring of the media, the controlling government - and you think, holy shit, it’s real. We recognize those feelings that Hollywood has bred inside of us and we realize why we liked those books in the first place - because of how real they are.

There has been injustice in this country since its birth. Now, however, after we’ve been conditioned to recognize it by our own pop culture, and now that we have that amazing tool that lets us communicate, things are beginning to change. For the first time, we are not reliant on the reports of major mainstream news stations for an idea of what’s happening - independent, non professional journalists have been live blogging their experiences with videos and photos. We are able to raise money for the grieving family of Mike Brown through an internet gofundme.com campaign. People across the country are able to pay for food at the food shelters in Ferguson, since the schools temporarily shut down and many of the lower class kids there can’t get food anywhere else. Through the internet, people were able to figure out that the police department’s account of Mike Brown’s death was inaccurate, and even prove that the video of him robbing a store that they “leaked” was fake. If word hadn’t been able to get out to that many people at a time, we likely wouldn’t have ever uncovered the lies.

The internet is transforming the world of news and journalling. The people of this country, from any class, can now take news into their own hands. The spark from Ferguson is already ebbing, but now our nation has seen what it can do. Maybe the next time something like this happens, we’ll be prepared. Maybe we’ll have a plan. Maybe the Internet generation will be the first generation to turn America into a true democracy.