I saw too many times situations when people 50 and up trust anything online really blindly – especially often when they see some text like “This is the best company in the world!” on the site of said company and then start to really believe that it’s true and become belligerent if you try to tell them “Hey, but it’s that company who wrote this text for promotion”.
Why is it like this? Something to do with aging and lack of desire to change once maid conclusions, or more about technologies? I don’t see them believeing newspapers this well, for example, or ads boards on the highway.
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I suspect this is about how different generations came to the internet and how people tend to handle technologies they don’t fully understand.
Older folks were introduced to the internet mostly through trusted media outlets and social media platforms filled with people from their inner circle. That initial trust in the source got transferred to the channel itself—“if it’s on the internet, it must be true.” Combine that with the attention economy and content algorithms, and it becomes really hard for them to tell what’s real from what’s not.
Now, I think the same thing is happening with millennials and GenAI. A lot of my friends don’t understand how GenAI works and are treating ChatGPT’s answers as absolute truth.
The internet was a very different place when I grew up with it.
Before all the data skimming and algorithm manipulation came to light it was seen as what it was originally intended for I guess. A place to have all the worlds knowledge at your finger tips.
Google actually gave you answers and not opinions back then.
Social Media led to the Arab spring and democracy flourishing across the globe.
Amazon/eBay made anything you wanted cheaper and deliverable to your door.
Man I miss those times.
Now the internets so shit it’s better off just living in the real world again. Funny how that’s gone full circle.
It’s black on white, like printed, it must be trustworthy.
Generally, those generations grew up with a significantly more regulated publishing process, where editorial review and self-censorship were integral parts of the pipeline.
Non-trustworthy sources did exist, too, of course – but usually they could be identified easily, e.g., by their tabloid appearance. For many years and in many places, there was a much stronger barrier between content and advertisement (even if just by aspiration and self-constraint).
The early internet was, of course, unregulated, but when it became a mass medium, it started to emulate traditional print. However, both the editorial and the advertisement wall have crumbled and are, in most part, non-existent.
BUT – contradicting above conjectures – I would argue that the age gap isn’t that big (if noticeable at all). I do not trust the younger generations as a whole to have a much more critical approach, and the “general distrust towards the internet” is no different from – and no more effective than – past time’s general “whatever they want print” attitude.