Black Christian Mind

The Youth of the Computer Age are Made Insane by the Internet, Drowned in Infotainment
by Sabrina Dawkins

The youth of today are insane. They are growing up in the Computer Age, where there is an endless supply of information readily available on the computer screen. What is true and what is false? I remember back in ’97 when I was first introduced to the Internet by my cute African friend: She looked just like a baby doll with her round face and big shiny eyes against dark skin. We were in our 11th grade English class after class had ended. She was smart and mature and showed me how to chat in an online chatroom. I was amazed by the fact that you could chat with a real person far away instantly.

But I realized many years later that having access to strangers online wasn’t necessarily a good thing. I’d met predatory atheists and other questionable people online and learned about the supposed existence of lizard-like aliens who worked alongside the military in underground bases. It didn’t occur to my younger mind then as I scoured the Internet looking for truth that adults were actively creating fictions in order to mislead me. Why would someone publish lies online on purpose? For control.

When I turned on that computer, I was flooded with online information and various “truths” about the nature of reality. I had grown up in a false church, and that was the only version of Christianity I knew, so I thought Christianity couldn’t be the answer. But I had a thirst for knowledge and yearned for the truth, so I searched and searched. I read article after article, browsed website after website looking for truth. I didn’t realize it then, but I was wasting my time and becoming more and more insane. Aliens, ascended masters, multiple galaxies—I believed it all in the past.

The problem was that the Internet had given me access to so much information at my fingertips, whereas the public library was at least a 25-minute drive away. In college I had access to a library on campus full of philosophical ideas that I could get lost in. But after college, I could no longer access it; and even when I had taken time out of my busy college schedule to spend the day rummaging through shelves and shelves of old library books, I can’t count on two hands the number of days I was able to do that. I just didn’t have the time as a full-time undergraduate student who also worked part time.

The Internet became the convenient way to get my information. Sure, as a commuting grad student and for maybe five years after I graduated, I would make infrequent trips to Barnes & Noble to randomly read excerpts from philosophy books. But those trips were considered treats. The drive was at least 20 minutes when there was no traffic: It took effort to get there. It was like going to the movies—you don’t go to the movie theater every day or even once a week. It’s a once-in-a-while thing that is like eating at an expensive restaurant. It wasn’t part of my daily routine.

My point is that while the library can be dangerous and lead impressionable minds on the wrong path, just as false educators who teach lies for a paycheck and who often provide the launch pad for exploration into false Internet land through years of indoctrinating students with false teachings and theories at the elementary, middle school, high school, and college levels so that they never have a firm foundation of truth to stand on to ward off false information, a screen in one’s own house is much more insidious. It is conveniently there every day and can be turned on with a quick flip of the switch, press of a button like a reliable friend. And your mind gets flooded with all the information that strangers want you to absorb. You don’t know their intentions. You don’t know their nature while consuming the information that grabs your attention. And that is the digital world the youth of today were born into, where they enter into a virtual reality without the goggles whenever they connect to the Internet. They find entertaining YouTubers—no dull moments in their videos—and absorb their content regardless of whether it’s true or false.

False or fictional information can be very entertaining. Fiction books sell surprisingly well. Think of the Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings series. People will pay a lot of money just to be whisked away into an author’s pretend world. Think of all the sitcoms and movies people spend their time and money consuming.

But the youth of today no longer know the difference between reality and fantasy. Both appear to them as an endless stream of entertainment online. They don’t know who’s acting and who’s not. They don’t know whether their favorite YouTuber with millions of subscribers is behaving naturally or just putting on a show in order to attract more subscribers. It’s like the Internet has become the next stage in reality TV, where regular people can now film their everyday lives. But as with “reality television,” the viewer can’t be sure it’s not scripted, especially once the uploader has millions of subscribers.

Impressionable minds are now able to easily soak up hours and hours of infotainment online. And now with smartphones, they are never separated from the Internet, even when they travel away from home. Without wisdom, their minds configure the infotainment in strange ways. They haven’t had the proper filters installed early on to dump the useless information: The public school system is godless. So I would say that the information ends up a hodgepodge of junk stuck in their brains. The result: They become insane.

A lot of black youth today seem to be stuck in fantasy land, their heads filled with faint memories of fast-moving figures and lights on a screen—flashy, fast-food junk infotainment. They look up to professional athletes, gamers, models, actors, and secular musicians. They memorize their stats and lyrics. With a straight face, they will tell you that they admire a particular gangster rapper, or LeBron James, or some other celebrity on the screen who gives them nothing but false hope and a false reality to live vicariously through. They don’t suspect that perhaps these people, these characters, were made famous for the purpose of leading them astray, leading them out of their minds and into a fake world where any degenerate can become rich and famous doing what they love and with no real responsibility.

Unfortunately for the fans, their worshiped celebrities don’t take responsibility for muddying their minds with junk and for being the dazzling addiction that causes them to neglect real-world responsibilities. During his November 16, 2018, interview on The Breakfast Club, millionaire gangster rapper Daniel “Tekashi 6ix9ine” Hernandez said, “Eighty percent of this industry is dirty niggas, 90%, dirty. Nah, for real. You know what it is? Being a grown-ass man, right, you got kids. Like, you a grown man. Mattress on the floor. Babies like, ‘Daddy, Daddy, milk, milk.’ And you over here on Instagram like, ‘Nah, nah. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on,’ watching me, a kid with rainbow hair, 69s on his face, pressed like, ‘Pull over. We got to go …’ You don’t got no car. You worried about a kid with rainbow hair. You not feeding your daughter. She running around like, ‘Daddy, my stomach hurt. Milk.’” The fans become the fools. As the celebrities and big YouTubers take their money and time, the fans deteriorate, their eyes glued to the screen as the real world passes them by. And all they have to show for it is a mind entertained to death, distracted by junk for so long that it bypassed real growth and development and found its way instead to a permanent exciting childhood in a fantasy world far away from reality and responsibility.

Yes, those who were born into or embraced the digital world of an endless flow of infotainment at their fingertips have become insane. They have made their home within a virtual reality. All the dissimilar bits of information that they’ve absorbed from their computer screens have flooded and incapacitated their minds, switching them from active thinkers into passive consumers, addicts waiting for their next hit of cheap entertainment. Then they parrot back the false information they’ve gotten from the deceptive screen without batting an eye, without realizing that the characters they quote are not real, but projections that real people put out because in the Computer Age, where information can be disseminated so quickly, they can pretend to be anyone or anything—a role model, a truther, a friend, a reporter, a musician, a teacher, a counselor—and instantly gain attention from millions of eyes without filters and primed to choose entertainment over truth.

References

[Breakfast Club Power 105.1 FM]. (2018, November 16). Tekashi 6ix9ine Explains Why He Fired His Team, Recent Shooting & New Album [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQ8NoQTT1fQ