The title was going to be "Why I constantly Cry About The Internet Being Shit" but ironically I am posting a blog via the internet for you to read,so I reasoned this irony with an insight into why I use it - consequently adding a facet to this little piece of writing which acts as an explanation to why the internet's shit, otherwise i would have purely posted a status on Facebook saying "Internet is shit", or as some of you might like to post "Internet is shit :/" to try and add a tiny amount of emotion and humour - humour in the sense that they are humouring themselves as well as an attempt to be vaguely humourous via the inclusion of a colon and a slash. This is virtual humour in its lowest form and may aswell be described as 'toilet humour'. It's major similarities with a toilet being the likely hoods of 'colons' being active and 'slashing' aplenty. The inclusion of emotion via a variance of alphabet, numbers and all manner of symbols available at your finger tips, is its own alphabet for emotions. But when i use these codes to send an emotion i won't truely be smiling, frowning, angry, shocked. My face doesn't falter, and I'm pretty sure other people's face's don't either. We are virtually feeling these emotions, and just like a computer, read the data without understanding the true interpretations or knowing whether the interpretations are true. We don't act organically as we should. Stimulus & Response, rarely anything else. Acting like droids for large portions of our days as we carry out codes into an item that stores the codes and grows like, well, ironically like an organism.
Computers are becoming the organic substance and reality itself gets sucked into it, becoming distorted and degrading every aspect. Every aspect converted to just a series of 0's and 1's. When i talk about the poisoning of social interaction my emphasis is aimed at social networking, namely facebook of course. I'm not pretending that i don't use it, i certainly do, and if you are actually reading this it would likely to have been via a link from my facebook. Its ease of sharing is unrivaled, to the extent we might, (and surprisingly often), post a status about the most menial, unconstructive and neutral things such as what we've just eaten. Utterly annoying... I've done it myself a lot. However, that doesn't stop my addiction to this wasteland of white pixels scattered with an ever growing and densely poppulated sea of bollocks. It even has an autonomous effect on the way we photograph and are photographing ourselves and each other. Note that it is an '
effect' and not '
affect' because it bipasses the emotional level - once again we act as if we are digital devices to be stored on computer. Our essence captured via the interpretation of a digital device, stored as data known as pixels and then stored as web data which we then subjectively judge, trying to infer a personality and completely failing to understand the complexities of the people we shuffle through. On a personal level, I found that if you hastily click through the photographs then it is likely that you do not know that person well and should really either delete them as a friend or get to know them. If, however, you gaze at the photographs, you are likely to be experience a human response, and to an extent it musters a provokement and recollection of attatched thought, nostalgia. I've found that even this enjoyment can become pacified with high facebook usage.
How we look in photographs knowing that they will be published and viewed by friends and acquaintances and even strangers is very evident, and for some girls can be crushing. Often the harder we might try to look good in a photograph the more obviously uncomfortable we are about it. There are many women, and men aswell, that will use the same expression, body language, and gestures over and over again. The photograph becomes a ritual as you pose, holding yourself still in anticipation to became a virtual piece of data, when it is the camera that holds you still anyway. Now as we are being photographed we autonomously envisage ourselves virtually, as an entity existing on the internet to be viewed by others, and for some, this is enough to cement a concrete response to the stimulus - photo, after photo, after photo.
The irony in this whole blog post is my obvious involvement with social networking, blogging, youtube etc. In truth, the internet's practicalities and ease are devestatingly potent and for this reason I can't see myself ever not using it due to it's addictive nature. Practicalities and ease are what we strive for yet i think we all know its accessibility is not rewarding. How much better is it to meet and talk with a friend than to talk to them on the internet? Taking a step back from the situation it is easy to recognise the problem in evolutionary terms, viewing humans just as any other animal. Why waste precious energy doing stuff and risking a higher percentage of not surviving when you could instead be resting and increasing your chances of passing your genes on to another generation? So we all rest and enjoy the comfort of the internet and the knowledge it beholds, and continue to pass our genes on as a duty to feed the young hatchling - the internet.
My title is 'Why I Constantly Cry About Internet Being Shit Yet Still Use It'. This title can be answered simply through analysing the title itself. When i say that I constantly 'cry about internet being shit' I am explaining two very human organic processes, in the description of a soulless and self unaware invention. The friction between natural process and digital environment highlights the main point I am basically making that as a species we are not all that well suited to live our lives virtually. Think of computer nerds, who have unfortunately for whatever reason have found they are not well suited to the natural social environment so they turn to computers for solace. They do not compute with society so they purely compute.
Now time to check my facebook...
