I spend a lot of time online. Way too much time, really, but that isn’t my point (really–I do have a point). I don’t live in my mother’s basement, or play WOW long into the night while washing down CheetOs and pizza with Red Bull. I do get outside as often as I can, I do have a husband who is a real person and very much alive, I do call my friends and family fairly often, and I do interact with real, live people face-to-face (when I must). Still, I spend a lot of time in the virtual world, and that’s the way I like it. I get news not from just one or two MSM cable channels that spoon-feed infotainment and do their level best to keep everyone terrified and waiting for “more at eleven”, but from a variety of sources on both sides of an issue, and I sort out my own opinions. I read articles, and read user opinions of them, just to see what other people think. I listen to music; sometimes my own, but just as often, online radio or FÃ¥gelnörd i Sverige. I can communicate with people all over the world, and can even see some of them on video feed if I want. I can also shut them off any time I want, which is one bonus the virtual world has over the real one. Heh.
One of my favourite aspects of the internet is that it’s filled with user-driven content. I’m not limited to whatever photography makes it to be published in a book or displayed in an art gallery; I can go to Flickr or Picasa and see a huge collection of all kinds of photos…and make my own choice as to what I like and what I don’t like, with or without HDR bokeh (Jesus wept). I’m not limited to reading articles written by professional journalists who have to make the finished product such that it will ultimately benefit the shareholders because anyone with a keyboard and a bit of web space can write an article, and I can read it or not…my choice. Regardless of what’s on TV or available at the local Blockbuster, I can watch videos of anything from adorable kittens discovering that they fit under a door to raunchy bukkake on a pool table…again, my choice. I haven’t listened to ordinary (read: ClearChannel, since they own it all) FM radio in years, and I have no interest whatsoever in it. When I do listen to online stations, I choose something that plays mostly-English music, but which has commercials in a language I don’t understand, or at least not well enough that the advertising annoys me. I can check out new bands and decide for myself whether I like the music without having to wait for them to get a recording contract, much less get MS radio play. The great thing about user-generated content is that it allows absolutely anyone with access to the hardware and software, and a place to upload it, to create practically anything, just as I’m doing right now by writing this. Granted, I go out of my way to not have this content really made public, but most people don’t, and the result is a huge, almost unending “buffet” of choices that I can accept or reject, based upon my own criteria, not someone else’s. I can choose who I communicate with, what I want to hear, and read, and see, and at any time, I can change my mind for no reason beyond, “I fucking felt like it”, or I can simply shut down the portal that allows it into my home and make it all go away; temporarily, or forever. It’s an extension of my strong aversion to being told what to do or what to think, which may or may not say something significant about my psyche, but that’s okay–it works.
Lowering the bar to entry, though, does have its pitfalls because you end up with stuff like YouTube comments (if you ever want to despair for the future of humanity, take a look through those sometime), and the entire cesspool that is MySpace. MySpace may have begun as a pretty good idea–a way that even grandma can have her own web site even though she can’t code–but it’s evolved into an online repository for pages designed so horribly that I want to poke forks in my eyes, with background music, and animations, and videos that auto-play if you don’t have scripts disabled. It’s like GeoCities 2.0…only with more than just bad background MIDIs. There are some good bands on there and you can listen to their music, but for the most part, it’s just a huge, steaming, fly-blown pile of digital dog crap. Sometimes, it’s both music you can listen to and digital dog crap. I didn’t find this on my own because I avoid MySpace like the plague that it is, but “Shana” does indeed have a MySpace page, and featured there is her techno music. I have nothing against techno–I can take it or leave it–but this is just so…very, very fucking horrible. Sunrise sonata…Christ, I’d rather listen to heavy equipment outside my bedroom window at 6AM. Proof positive that sometimes, it isn’t a bad idea to raise the bar a little.
Oh yeah, and when I forget (again) how to turn off that annoying fucking Google Suggest without allowing cookies to be saved or being logged in all the time (well of course anyone who can see my computer should have access to my Gmail and Picasa albums because I happen to have left my desk), it’s change the URL to this:
http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=0
Who ever thought that was a good idea? If I wanted an invasive annoyance popping up in my face, assuming it knows what I intend to type EVEN THOUGH I HAVEN’T FUCKING TYPED IT YET, I’d just use Yahoo!. Note that I do not…Google became my home page in 1999 or so because it was simple and did a good job. Still does a pretty good job, but the simplicity is slowly being eroded. The doodles are kind of cute, and sometimes even interesting, but for Christ’s sake, leave it alone. Google ain’t broke–don’t fix it. Oh well, at least it’s not “Cuil” or whatever the hell that useless site that got so much hype a while back was called.
