I found out (on TikTok) that teenagers are using Wattpad instead of Ao3 to read fanfiction because they “don't know how to use the filtering system”.

This is a bigger issue than one website, and it's troubling for a couple of reasons:

1. They don't know how to use the internet (or even computers) anymore. Yes, you read it correctly. They are as well-versed in how the web works as boomers.

2. They also don't understand skeuomorphs from real life, because we stopped using those in favour of digital analogies.

For millennials, computers were a machine to be conquered: customised, changed, used as a resource. We learned to pirate software, to build websites and to access everything that was not within reach before.

Tech killed those with optimisation and subscription models.

And as the digital world became a natural environment, we stopped using physical systems to model digital ones.

Teenagers don't need to understand how a physical camera works to understand their phones, and they don't need to have been to a library to understand web searching.

We're barreling towards a hyperreality, where these twi values are inverted. The real world will be shaped and changed by the digital, and digital metaphors will be used to explain the real. It's already happening.