I hate the internet.
I used to like the internet. Back in the days when it felt anonymous, unregulated, untamed and unorganized.
Back then, no one knew who you were, and no one particularly cared. The only aspects of you that were ever apparent were those that you chose to present: be it in the form of a personal web page, a mundane internet diary, cumbersome message board posts, or a random fanpage about xyz. More importantly, if you chose to show your proverbial face in multiple venues, there was no necessity, and little chance, of those venues being connected by anyone but yourself. And if you made a mistake, you could quickly remove the page, or post, or what-have-you without the ever-looming spectre of Google cache showing you up. Sure, it wasn't ever really anonymous. Sure, that information always stayed on somebody's servers. But it was a hell of a lot harder to connect and access these things in the olden days, and I miss the freedom and safety that imparted. These days, there's not even an illusion that one controls their own information once it enters the realm of the internet: Google has the exposure end covered. And the advent of social networking sites means that there's a decent change a good portion of that information will be linked to your real-world, corporeal form's name... via a site that serves your grandmother. And that, dear friends, strikes me as unspeakably vulgar.
In the olden days, surfing the web felt like an adventure. You could start at any small, insignificant point, and were veritably guaranteed to find a host of links to similarly small and insignificant places. And you could hop from point to point to point. Nowadays, you go to wikipedia, exhaust their resources, and are lucky if you can hop anywhere of note from those resources. Everything feels like a giant conglomerate that only cares for its own site's traffic these days. And as Google provides that traffic all by itself, links sections have been unofficially retired from use.
The web used to allow one to be thorough, too. Nowadays, any site with real, textual content is invariably in the form of a blog. And though there's probably some way to effectively sift through a blog and read it all, I have yet to find it. Meanwhile, I used to do that with personal web-pages all of the time. This matter isn't helped by the fact that more insipid, day-to-day drivel has been put on the web than used to be the case. In the days when people coded their own webpages, they seem to have been less prone to wasting their own, and others' time. (I always hated the blog format, it's the main reason I stayed at Diaryland instead of LiveJournal for as long as I did.)
And my last gripe, at least of the moment, is the fact that video has overtaken the internet. YouTube has given way to "vlogs" and constant links to moving pictures. True facts: I almost never have the patience to sit down and watch the two dozen videos I find in front of me each day. With text, I can scroll though, skim, pick out what's interesting, and start and stop it without feeling ridiculous. In short, it suits my fruit-fly attention span. Meanwhile, even the two-five minutes of undivided attention a YouTube video would ask of me generally feels like more than I can give. This is, for the record, why I switched from television to the internet as a teen in the first place. Television, and video in general, does not allow enough multi-tasking to not feel like an intense burden to me.
And there, dear readers, you have it. The reasons I have begun to hate the internet and resort to silly, non-linear (read: boring) video game worlds and books in my old age. Because the internet just ain't what it used to be.
Back then, no one knew who you were, and no one particularly cared. The only aspects of you that were ever apparent were those that you chose to present: be it in the form of a personal web page, a mundane internet diary, cumbersome message board posts, or a random fanpage about xyz. More importantly, if you chose to show your proverbial face in multiple venues, there was no necessity, and little chance, of those venues being connected by anyone but yourself. And if you made a mistake, you could quickly remove the page, or post, or what-have-you without the ever-looming spectre of Google cache showing you up. Sure, it wasn't ever really anonymous. Sure, that information always stayed on somebody's servers. But it was a hell of a lot harder to connect and access these things in the olden days, and I miss the freedom and safety that imparted. These days, there's not even an illusion that one controls their own information once it enters the realm of the internet: Google has the exposure end covered. And the advent of social networking sites means that there's a decent change a good portion of that information will be linked to your real-world, corporeal form's name... via a site that serves your grandmother. And that, dear friends, strikes me as unspeakably vulgar.
In the olden days, surfing the web felt like an adventure. You could start at any small, insignificant point, and were veritably guaranteed to find a host of links to similarly small and insignificant places. And you could hop from point to point to point. Nowadays, you go to wikipedia, exhaust their resources, and are lucky if you can hop anywhere of note from those resources. Everything feels like a giant conglomerate that only cares for its own site's traffic these days. And as Google provides that traffic all by itself, links sections have been unofficially retired from use.
The web used to allow one to be thorough, too. Nowadays, any site with real, textual content is invariably in the form of a blog. And though there's probably some way to effectively sift through a blog and read it all, I have yet to find it. Meanwhile, I used to do that with personal web-pages all of the time. This matter isn't helped by the fact that more insipid, day-to-day drivel has been put on the web than used to be the case. In the days when people coded their own webpages, they seem to have been less prone to wasting their own, and others' time. (I always hated the blog format, it's the main reason I stayed at Diaryland instead of LiveJournal for as long as I did.)
And my last gripe, at least of the moment, is the fact that video has overtaken the internet. YouTube has given way to "vlogs" and constant links to moving pictures. True facts: I almost never have the patience to sit down and watch the two dozen videos I find in front of me each day. With text, I can scroll though, skim, pick out what's interesting, and start and stop it without feeling ridiculous. In short, it suits my fruit-fly attention span. Meanwhile, even the two-five minutes of undivided attention a YouTube video would ask of me generally feels like more than I can give. This is, for the record, why I switched from television to the internet as a teen in the first place. Television, and video in general, does not allow enough multi-tasking to not feel like an intense burden to me.
And there, dear readers, you have it. The reasons I have begun to hate the internet and resort to silly, non-linear (read: boring) video game worlds and books in my old age. Because the internet just ain't what it used to be.