I guess you could call me a chief representative of the MTV generation. A bastard child born somewhere between the rave kids of the 80s and the guilt ridden, self loathing adults that were created of it, late into the 90s. With it came a great many things. The obligatory My Super Sweet Sixteen re-runs on a typically dull northern Sunday afternoon, the low hung hoodies, high tops and and higher overdrafts, enough alcohol to induce a pre-emptive liver spasm and a fair few chemical compounds that would likely have had my mother’s eyebrows doing a dance of their own. We didn’t know any better, I still don’t, hell, it was my mother I first called after popping my pill virginity, “Hi mum, guess what? I’m on ecstasy!”

Mine is a story (maternal confessions aside) that likely most pop teens of the MTV era know and love. There are subtle differences, sure, I mean, not everyone likes My Super Sweet, not all of us used to drool over Cribs, not all of us grew up on a healthy diet of The Ozbournes, snorting Angel Delight whip for kicks and bunking off school to hang around the bike shed looking at a dirty mag with your mates. Heck, I remember when the only porn that you could get hold of was in the form of a smuggled VHS. How times have changed.

Yes, no longer are brick like black cassette tapes traded as if they were spices from a far-away land, no, for the thing that really came to epitomise the MTV generation was its good fortune to be sat right on the cusp of change. We were the generation that took on the Goliath that is the internet.

Almost every Gen Y’er had a Myspace profile. The site that is no doubt responsible for creating a whole future of men and women with one arm longer than the other and a permanent head-tilt came to identify a growing phenomena known as social networking. Now it’s pointless me going into the ins and outs of what social networking is, chances are if you’re reading this blog, you are doing so through a referral from Facebook or Twitter, so I’ll spare you the patronising pep-talk. No, what really interests me is the way in which we have become an entire generation so well integrated with technology that we consider is not only a form of entertainment, but an essential utility.

Be honest, how many of you could live without a computer? Without your Facebook, your Twitter, your bitchy status updates as you sit in a nightclub, your photo-stalks the morning after, I mean hell, how many of you could simply live without online social networking? Not I, and we’ve barely taken account of the other ways in which the internet caters for an ever consuming but simplified lifestyle. I bought my chinese take-away online, paid by card so that I didn’t have to have any cash to hand. I bought some new headphones online from a store in the United States. I made a transfer to my mate’s bank account, chatted to some friends, watched a BBC TV show, ordered and paid for my groceries, made a phone call for a taxi, uploaded a few new snaps, screamed out my mood to the world of Twitter and got my day’s supply of porn. I can get all of this in one place, on one screen. No need for a television, no pen required for a shopping list, no expensive phone bill to rack up. Nope, the internet caters for all our needs.

 

So what then, is the result of this all-encapsulating utility? Well, one could argue that it has been the sole destroyer of our youth, that it has seen clubbing turnouts drop, social skills fall, and has created an entire future of people incapable of living their lives outside of the safety and confines of a fifteen by fifteen TFT. There’s a small ounce of truth in that sensationalism. It’s true to say that I’d struggle to find anyone roughly my own age who has not embarked upon the self representation of a Facebook profile, and it’s true to say (at least for myself) that we spend an unhealthy amount of our free-time clicking the refresh button, indulging in online bitchery and self prescribed inversion that we wouldn’t dream of (or been given the opportunity to do) in reality.

But what of previous phenomena that took the world by storm? The television revolutionised the way in which we receive information, family life started to revolve more and more around living room entertainment, with the front room now sculptured ever so carefully around a wood and glass picture box. It’s not actually the case that the internet has seen the end of the television (though ratings are at an all-time low) but it’s a comparable in its own right, granted that the introduction of the TV slowly but surely (and not so slowly in some cases) wiped out many other forms of information communication, most notable of these, the family radio set.

I remember, when I was a kid, when the Nintendo 64 really took off, that the whole street had been given one for Christmas. I got a Pikachu Nintendo, and a whole host of games, as did everyone else, and what had once been a year-on-year scene of two dozen kids playing out in the streets, was now an insulated, indoor, virtual marathon that had no end in sight. Things never really went back to the way they had once been from that day forth. We spend all our time either on our own, or on our mate’s games consoles, trading Poke’mon, or battling on Super Smash Bros. Where once we made our own entertainment, entertainment was now sold in small grey cartridges.

 

Nintendo only do games, Nintendo are an entertainment company, an N64 is not what you would consider a utility (indeed I grew out of gaming almost altogether, despite my twelve year old self promising to be a professional gamer..) But the internet, or rather, the way in which we access and use the internet, is what you and I would consider an essential. It is essential not just for our own convenience, but essential because of the ways in which the virtual highway has become integral to our working economy. There are very few transactions (online or off) that take place outside of a data stream. That’s because it is faster and more efficient for a store to install chip and pin devices, faster and more efficient for the government to upload online application forms, and soon, faster and more efficient for all stores, warehouses, depots, agencies, airlines, bars, restaurants and all manner of other outlets to integrate fully (we’re looking at you RFID) with an online super-integrated network of business, consumers, and information.

All this though, is beside the point. The internet, with all it’s economic fruits (and there are many, and growing) is a perfect hub for budding young entrepreneurs and big business alike, the entertainment we can find, like BBC iPlayer and their rival counterparts provide us with a fresh and flexible alternative to broadcast media, the online news we can access grants us immediacy that the paper press cannot compete with (as we are now finding out) and having a global emporium at your newly liberated fingertips (and not so liberated bank balance) has easily demonstrated the march of the ever hungry internet, but the social element is uncertain in its future.

Social networking does not retain this growth guarantee. The economic model relies entirely upon a userbase that is forever entertained by comments, status’s, photos, video, shared news stories and applications, and frankly, I don’t think it can last.
The death of Myspace was a turning point in social networking. Many forecasted that Facebook would (and somewhat has) become the unrivalled king of the hello-to-you world of the net, and that because it was the new (and better) model, it would supersede Myspace and this is why the old models failed. But they’re wrong.

Myspace didn’t fail simply because Facebook had a cleaner, less complicated interface, it didn’t fail simply because Facebook has more (and ever growing) features (that Myspace eventually came to mimic,) no, Myspace failed because people wanted change, people wanted something fresh. Much as a UK election looms and the people of Britain, as the people of the United States before them (and a hundred times before them) sought change in their elected officials, so to do the people of the internet seek new, flashy surroundings to play in. The Achilles’ heel of the net lies in its structure: limitation.

How many more website upgrades can there be? There are only so many ways you can rephrase a simple communication. Call it a comment, call it a poke, call it a ‘like,’ it’s essentially all the same material, floating around on different websites, all of them interacting with each other. It’s likely no coincidence then that the vast majority of social networking users are young (but with a fast growing older generation on Facebook) – a crowd that has very little disposable income and who are boring with the old models of communication that are the television and the games console. It would be arrogant for social networking giants to feel that this is not a problem that they will have to face within the decade, even sites such as Twitter, that focus on information transfer, and sit somewhere on the fence, in-between stability and the fast-flow stream of the ever changing face of our virtual social lives will have to take a close look at their business model when those who use it now no longer get a kick from a tweet on the bus.

What then will we do when we no longer need, want, nor enjoy the models of communication that we feed and sustain today? What then when we no longer hold our online representatives up on high? Is it the case that this reality will never be realised, that we will always record the most flattering elements of life in a digital journal for all the world to see, or is it the case that when the screen goes black we may just have to look at our own social models?

We may even have to socialise face to face. Now that is a scary future.