We’re Not Worthy

By Travs Epes

I just spent an hour and a half browsing the web. I cleaned up my friends list on Facebook, sifted through various tech blogs evaluation/bashing the iPad, and fulfilled my daily pseudo-intellectual fix with some webcomics.

As I flounder around this virtual stew, my English essay remains unfinished, week-old dishes grow a solid layer of grease, and I let an hour an a half slip away. And for what? I’m now moderately more in sync with tech culture, and in ten months I’ll have about eighty fewer people pretending to wish me happy birthday. In only an hour and a half, I’ve managed to pervert a device which could have connected me to something constructive, say learning about why Haiti is portrayed so poorly by the media.

This whole experience reminded me of an article I read last year in Playboy (yes they print more than pinups). In the special piece Future Tense, the gentleman’s magazine gathered some of America’s top minds to comment on the prospects of the upcoming decade. The list included Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane, who, in his own crude style, had this to offer:

Electronic devices packed into microprocessors can bring every piece of written knowledge to our desktop at the touch of a finger, and still we huddle inside office cubicles, watching two young Asian women share a cup of poop. A network of orbiting global satellites circles the planet, bouncing sound and images to places once unreachable, with the potential to unite us with messages of hope—and I use it to do a show about a guy who once turned down sex with his wife because he farted so hard he hurt his balls.

Apparently this is a common problem (with the internet, not Peter’s sex life). There appears to be a growing gap between what the internet promises and the product your ISP delivers.

When confronted with this realization, the general reaction is to point an accusing cursor at the internet for overwhelming us with “information” that sucks us into a self-perpetuating loop. Who hasn’t followed a blog linked on Twitter, then bounced to another site from that blog, then got sucked into a Top Ten [Insert Timely Topic Here] list on College Humor or Cracked.com, only to realize a new video was posted on Facebook, which starts the entire cycle all over again.

If this is the common user experience, it’s hard to see the internet as the Information Super-Highway Al Gore’s propaganda in the nineties promised it would be. Some even go as far as to say this highway looks more like a hot tub — a place where friends and neighbors veg out while quietly sharing diseases.

I think MacFarlane was onto something when he used both television and the web to illustrate this problem. Previous generations, generally, had to choose between MTV, whippits, or the fuzzy pleasure of restricted cable stations (ask your older brothers) when they wanted to kill boredom. Those of us in the Last Generation were (un)lucky enough to be born in a revolutionary time for broadcast media. Our older siblings and cousins might have felt empowered with supporting their MTV, but we had MTV, VH1, BET, ABC, CBS, Disney, Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, and Comedy Central all battling over our Saturday morning attention.

We were gods. Tiny, sugar-fueled titans with complete control in the palm of our hand. After growing up this type of environment, it’s no wonder we hear stories about internet addiction. The web’s greatest feature – an infinite space for ideas – is easily abused by the narcissism our televised conditioning left us with.

It’s not hard to see the connection between “couch surfing” and “surfing the web”. Regardless, let’s avoid branding the internet as boob-tube 2.0. Just because we see the net within the same framework as television, it doesn’t mean that there are not crucial differences between the two.

My favorite example of this is reddit, a media sharing and pseudo-social networking site. Were you to give the site a passing glance, it seems like the perfect fit for the hot tub analogy above (minus the disease). Here are hundreds of thousands of users all sharing links to anything from Computer Engineer Barbie to articles about current Indian Politics. Indeed, with dedicated users constantly updating every vague site of interest they stumble upon, it’s all too easy to fall into that familiar repeating loop.

Surely with this sort of set up, we should expect nothing constructive to come from reddit. Yet, when the earthquake struck Haiti, redditors donated $31,415 in just five hours. In twelve hours, that number doubled, and currently their total $178,030.93. Not bad for a site with 0.30% of internet usage (compared to Facebook, which carries around 30%).

How did this group of info-zombies escape the internet’s time-sink?

While it’s true sites like reddit might trap the casual user, those more experienced understand the need to actually participate in the site. To only read and not share would be like going to a party and not talking to anyone. Sure it’s possible, and maybe even educational if you’re a sociologist — but this seems to miss the point of going out. If all you wanted was to be entertained by watching others, why not just stay home and watch TV instead?

Unfortunately, as we know it now, the internet does look a lot like television. We should remember however, that the internet (in the way we use it) is barely twenty years old. Our generation will be the last to remember what life was like before the web. Think about that for a second. Unless we go through some grand technological holocaust, every future generation will be raised with an established internet that will grow and change with them.

Television has changed drastically since ten channel, fourteen hour broadcasts our grandparents grew up with. There are thousands of channels, with the power to stop, pause, rewind, and record at our whim, but in the end the formula remains the same. The internet breaks that model, and offers the user with endless opportunities to create and become more involved than we (yet) know what to do with. Here’s to hoping we catch up soon.