There’s probably not a halfway Social Media savvy person under the age of 30 that doesn’t know what the Human Centipede is, or Two Girls One Cup or Goatse (sp?) or a rusty trombone or a blue waffle is, because once they learned about it/them, they gleefully passed the info along to someone else. Great work, Internet! The Internet is the the Panopticon realized, perfected and made flesh: not only do we watch each other, but we enthusiastically watch ourselves. Social Media has turned us all into attention seekers, TMIers. Did any regular reader of boingboing.net not see Cory’s “NSA Inside” post and inwardly (if not outwardly) groan? And every time I see “This Day in Blogging History” I think to myself “This is what it’s coming to: an infinite regression of self-referential comments.” A rejection of an aspect of the present isn’t a reminiscince of the past. Watch a movie before, say, 1999 and you will see the difference. People weren’t attached to their smartphones and laptops and nintendos. But more than that, people were different, they regarded others, and the activities of others, in a different way. Hell, we ARE the nsa; the nsa is in US. Another subject: childhood obesity (and now adult obesity) is a direct result of home videogaming and internet addiction. There is a PSA commercial running now that recommends that kids get “at least 30 minutes of exercise a day”. Wow. We’re having to talk kids into running around outdoors for 30 minutes. Many of us physically look different now, because of the Internet in our lives (heck, as our lives.) Thanks, Internet. Radio, and later television, did not radically change people’s physical and mental makeup, folks. Neither of them changed society as we know it. The Internet did that. Go to youtube and watch a news broadcast from as recently as eh i dunno the mid 90s? late 90s? and look at one now. Or better yet, a talk show. People act differently now. People interact differently now. Grown men and women use memespeak. There’s a “hive” mentality to it all. We pass the latest “clever” or “interesting” or “scandalous” bit/byte on to our friends, and so on and so on and so on. We wind up sharing the same ideas. When we receive the same stimuli, our responses become the same, or become more likely to be the same. We become plottable. Managable. Our outrage at the Africa aids comment girl, at the kids who bullied the old lady on the bus, at the woman who threw the cat in the garbage can, it’s all just so much BS. “The Internet: always reminding us that somewhere, someone is doing something we can get worked up about.” The Internet churns the ethers that make us less human.
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