How a year of living almost exclusively online made the internet weird again
CNN
On the audio-based app Clubhouse, people are gathering in virtual rooms to make whale moaning noises or to participate in silent meditation together. Hundreds of people on the popular gaming platform Discord started a server where they just send each other the letter "h" all day every day. And a new Twitter account created this week shows the same short clip of Tony Soprano crying in his car with different sad songs playing in the background and has quickly racked up thousands of followers.
After several years of concerning headlines about misinformation, election meddling, filter bubbles, online harassment and more, there are flickers of a more carefree -- and weird -- internet. At times it felt like a throwback to a more innocent web, when Dancing Baby filled our inboxes, Second Life took on a life of its own and Rickrolling was an ever-lingering threat. And all it took was a devastating pandemic that forced many in the United States and around the world to live their lives almost exclusively online for much of the past year. Make no mistake, those long-simmering problems remain. A year into the pandemic, we've seen both the dark and light sides of people spending more time online: Women, people of color and the LGBTQ community continue to face disproportionate harassment online. Boredom, anxiety and fear during the pandemic have driven people into dangerous conspiracy theories like QAnon or baseless anti-vaxxer beliefs.More Related News