In The River in the Sky, a book-length poem published shortly before his death, Clive James makes reference to “YouTube’s vast cosmopolis”. Like many people from his generation, his reaction to the internet is characterised by a sort of awe – particularly over the ease of access to different historical material. You can search for a video of Jimi Hendrix playing live and there it is. That’s not something that was historically available from your couch. You would have to go and get physical media – a tape, a recording, maybe a DVD depending on the year. Your local video store would have to have a Jimi Hendrix concert in stock, or you’d have to order it in a shop or wherever else. And that’s assuming the footage was even available for sale. Some company has to be selling Jimi Hendrix concert DVDs in order for you to buy them. You needed a whole commercial enterprise before you could get access to this stuff. If it’s not a huge artist – if it’s some little pub band playing on the weekend – there’s nothing doing.

To take another example, many countries have started digitising elements of their national history, like newspaper records. New Zealand has a whole bunch of material online: in the Otago Witness, a weekly illustrated newspaper, there was a section called ‘Dot’s Little Folk’, where kids from around New Zealand would all write in and have these little social conversations in the newspaper’s pages. The column was headed by ‘Dot’, the pen name of editor William Fenwick, who would offer short little replies to everyone’s letters. On 15 July 1908, for instance, on page 84, we have ‘Welsh Boy’ writing in to say he’s fourteen and quitting school. “I shall be 14 years old next month, so it is time I went to work, don’t you think so, Dot?” That’s something we can just find from home – I’ve just looked it up now. Previously you’d have to go down to the library, or the local archives, and pull physical newspapers out of storage and flip through them all – and you can only go back through the copies that the library has physically collected and preserved across the years. If somebody spills coffee over that paper from 15 July, it’s gone. You’re going to have to go and find one of the other surviving copies.

I’m sort of labouring the point here – which, depending on when you grew up, may or may not feel redundant. If you’re a bit older, if you were around before the internet, you might think – yes, exactly, that’s what it was like. If you’re born after the internet, you might think – sure, okay, I’ve not necessarily thought about it in that way. Either this stuff is going to trigger a memory of personal experience or it’s going to be sort of alien. What’s interesting, to me, is that generational divide. Call it your Gen-X vs Zoomers thing, if you want – I tend to think millennials, depending on their age, sit somewhere on the cusp between the two worlds. When I was in primary school, I remember making a presentation on popcorn by using an encyclopedia we had around the house. That’s where I got my information from. By the time I hit university, I knew people who went through their whole degree without ever going into the library. They’d do all their research online. That’s the kinda timeframe of that transition for me personally. But it’s then interesting to see people like Clive James, even as late as 2018 (when he published The River in the Sky), still being rhapsodic about the internet. It used to be hard for him to find things, and he still really treasures the access that the internet brings.

For most people in that younger bracket, I think the internet probably has some different connotations. Because they lack that experience of life before the internet, they probably don’t attach the same value to what it brings. I feel like the quintessential zoomer experience of YouTube is much more – I don’t know, Logan Paul taping a suicide victim in Japan and posting it on the internet. I feel like that side of things is probably the more emblematic experience of YouTube for the younger generation. It’s the knowing experience of a digital native rather than the awe of pre-digital immigrants. It’s not that zoomers are jaded or unappreciative – you know, none of this is about criticising people for being young. I think there’s a natural and appropriate difference in how people experience the internet on either side of this generational gap. A lot of older people I think are still at the stage of incredulity, while digital natives, the kids who grew up with the internet, are going to be a little less impressed, a little more at ease, and probably also more conscious of the various issues.

For example, digital natives are probably going to be slightly more conscious of the issues around finding actual valuable information on the internet. There’s so much junk out there. We have these platforms designed to grab and hold our attention at any cost – where it sort of doesn’t matter what’s being said as long as it’s capturing an audience. We’ve been talking and thinking about clickbait for ten or fifteen years now – these sort of fake articles that are designed to get attention, get clicks, while lacking any sort of valuable or interesting content. Earlier this week I saw an article titled ‘Dark Souls 4 has fans divided for one very good reason‘. I thought – oh, I didn’t know that had been announced, and clicked in to read about it. Turns out Dark Souls 4 has not been announced: writer Sam Cawley was paraphrasing a conversation he saw on Reddit where people were arguing about the merits of a hypothetical fourth game. Sam seems to have been quite busy that day, publishing eight separate articles – anyway, I’m sure that’s not relevant – in short, I fell for the trap. I clicked the clickbait. I thought there might be some piece of news or some announcement that I’d missed, and it was just some guy repackaging a Reddit post – some guy putting up an attention-grabbing headline to try and feed you a couple ads. This sort of thing makes it difficult to find new or interesting information. It’s low effort junk. It floods the internet – and as a practice, it’s made easier by the widespread availability of ChatGPT and other chatbot programs. Previously you had to do the work of paraphrasing somebody else’s Reddit conversation – now you can get a bot to scrape the conversation and paraphrase it for you. The problem is going to get worse.

What’s interesting here is not the clickbait itself – it’s the fact that the topics of clickbait and generative AI are so far from Clive and his vision of “YouTube’s vast cosmopolis”. There’s a generational gap between people who are conscious of clickbait, who’re thinking about the problems of AI, and the boomers who are sort of still floored by the concept of digitised newspapers. For digital natives, I think one of the key issues with the internet today is discoverability. There’s so much that’s fed to us by the algorithm, and we know it’s a problem – we know we need to go out and actually look for things – but there’s also such an abundance of material that it’s hard to know where to start. This is a topic I’ve been circling around for a while – in an article from last year, for instance, on how to find good books, we talked about discoverability and the actual process of finding things to read, especially with so much media centralising under these two or three massive industry titans. Even back in 2020, with the incredibly large itch.io bundle, we were talking about the problems around how we value video games and digital fiction. Supply and demand are connected, and they rotate around the question of value. If you can buy 1700 video games for $5, what’s the value of a video game? If you can read every historical newspaper for free, what’s the value of any of them? We have generative AI, we have people like Sam repackaging Reddit posts for clicks – supply on the internet has never been higher, and it feels increasingly difficult to find value amongst it all.

In some ways, I feel, the older generation are actually better positioned to handle these issues. They’re coming in from a place where they had to put effort into finding things. They had to do the work – they had to go down to the library or whatever. They have experience with discovery. The age of the internet arrives for those people as an age of liberation. For other, younger people, who maybe lack those skills – lack that experience of searching for material in a pre-digital age – they might not have the same practice with discovery. You just go to YouTube and search ‘Jimi Hendrix’, and there he is. Discovery is a skill. It needs to be practiced, rehearsed. It has to go badly for a while. In the age of gen-AI and internet slush, I think we need to look back at some of those pre-internet habits of discovery. I think there’s stuff in there that can help us navigate this new world.

When the First World War broke out, ‘Welsh Boy’ fought in Egypt. His real name was Albert Llewellyn Hughes, and he served as part of the New Zealand Field Artillery. In a letter to the Little Folk, he talks about seeing the pyramids – he took off his shoes and got to crawl inside. By 1916 he was posted in France, where he was killed on September 16. He was 22.