January 2010

who? who gave this site a seal of approval?

I write a humor blog about the Internet, but I'd like to think that doesn't make me a hypocrite when I say that I want the Internet to be more respectable. It seems to be taking an inordinate amount of time for this medium to be taken seriously in the wider world despite its obvious contribution to everything from international commerce to politics. It's reductive and just plain wrong to believe that the presence of porn (ahem, lots of porn) and other kinds of human absurdity automatically makes the Internet dismissible. After all, there's arguably more smut and dreck among the printed word than affecting or thought-provoking literature, but we don't think of books as being inherently less respectable than other media. No, if anything keeps the Internet branded an intellectual pariah, it's the sheer laziness of sites like VeteransHelping.org.

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I honestly believe that craigslist will be the subject of an in-depth future study of Internet trends and human social behavior. By then the site will be defunct, as I frequently insist that we are indeed living in the age of craigslist's slow but inevitable decline. See, there's a difference between living and thriving. Craigslist is active, it's alive, but it's no more thriving than a potted plant in a college dorm room. The site's bad habits and unhealthy developments are slowly killing it, or at least setting the stage for whatever does eventually kill it. It's like your old uncle who drinks too much, smokes cigars and lives on fast food, and not mainstream fast food, but the cut-rate local burger stands with depressingly ramshackle facades. The booze, tobacco and Bubba Burgers aren't exactly killing Uncle Jake, but they're slowly fostering a wide variety of nasty conditions that will one day claim his life. On craigslist, the Bubba Burger is prostitution.

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Because winter is the time when everything good about life either dies or becomes significantly less pleasant, disease has found its way into my apartment. Common sickness does strange things to the human psyche, including increasing its desire for old TV shows. Last night I sat with my roommate, the bastard who brought the dreaded seasonal rhinovirus into this home, and we flipped through the few channels we could get on our digitally-converted antenna TV, stopping occasionally on whatever program our plague-addled minds found interesting. This led us more often than not to one of several PBS stations. After watching Rick Steves embarrass his fantastically white self in Iran, we delighted in the grandmotherly decadence of Julia Child and her caretaker/assistant Jacques. Two things occurred to me then: Ouch, my throat really hurts, and cooking shows have really, really low production values. So, I decided to pop over to Youtube to see what the cheap videographers of the medium have to offer in the form of cooking shows.

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I am utterly fascinated by memes. Because I've never really been a denizen of the Internet's many image boards and forums, I can't say that I'm ever up to date on what the latest memes are or even how most of them came to be. I suppose I'd like to keep it that way. I prefer memes to have a mysterious quality to them, as if they just materialized out of the ether one day. Most of them undoubtedly start as crappy photoshop jokes launched into the world by bored teenagers, but in the hands of the faceless many they achieve a transcendent quality. Memes are no longer just jokes, they're practically metaphysical. They are references to references, surreal alterations of individual moments in time. Memes are annoying and beautiful, disgusting and unique, immature and disarmingly smart. But inherent to the qualities of memes is a short lifespan. Memes disappear with little ceremony, their trails all but erased.

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One of the Internet's greatest contributions to society is its ability to connect people from all over the world who otherwise never would have come in contact with one another. Even more remarkable is how readily Internet users from around the globe accept each other. For previous generations, just getting a rock record from England was a big deal, an exotic rarity that had all the allure of a 19th century trip to India. Today it's commonplace to watch a video from Croatia, listen to a pop song from Japan and, thanks to the likes of Ebay and craigslist, buy a used DVD player off some guy in Canada, all from the deep-fried economic shambles of the good old US of A. In fact, posts from foreign people may just be my favorite part of craigslist. They provide all the bad spelling and horrible grammar of a crappy American post minus the exasperation and disappointment of realizing my nation's public education system is a mess, and they frequently contain nuggets of delicious insanity that you just can't get from a domestic.

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