Almost half of young people would prefer a world without the internet. We are haunted by the feeling that it has robbed us of something vital
A video went viral on X a few months ago that I can’t stop watching. It’s 2003: the band that later becomes MGMT are performing their song Kids to their peers, years before they become a pop sensation, in a dusty quad at Wesleyan University, Connecticut. Social media doesn’t exist yet. There is something about the way people look and behave and inhabit the space that tugs at my heartstrings and fills me with nostalgia. No one is dressed that well; the camera zooms unsteadily to capture the crowd’s awkwardness, slumped shoulders and arrhythmic bopping. Beyond the footage we’re watching, no one seems to be filming.
I was only four when the video was filmed, so why does watching it make me feel as if I’ve lost a whole world? A recent survey suggests I’m not alone – that almost half of young people would prefer a world without the internet. If anything, I expected a higher percentage. This doesn’t mean my generation really would like to reverse everything that’s happened in the last few decades, but there’s clearly something we feel we’re missing out on that older people have had, and we attribute it to the internet – or at least to its current form, dominated as it is by social media.
Isabel Brooks is a freelance writer
