Tuesday, July 15, 2003

The Internet is shit
While I agree that the Internet is shit*, I wholeheartedly disagree with this article.

I can name 20 people from my old school class who aren't in Google. I can walk into any public library, no matter how tiny and underfunded, and find facts, stories, amazing information I would never touch in a month of webcrawling. I can go into a bar and hear stories Usenet hasn't come close to in its 22 years of waffle.

I can name 20 people from my old school class who aren't in the library, so what's your point?

*The web is exactly what you make of it. If you don't care what you'll find, then you'll find shit, not to mention large credit card bills. If you actually put some effort into it, the Internet can be wonderful. Get a good browser, try looking on the second page of Google, anything. There are several billion websites out there to be found. How many books are at your local library?

Notice I didn't even mention weblogs, which are arguably the most desirable fruit of the world wide web. How many of your precious books update themselves frequently (sometimes several times a day), giving seemingly endless insight into other people's lives. There is seemingly infinite information on just about any subject you could fathom found in the "blogsphere". The universe of weblogs provides one with an avenue to take, off the beaten path, that shows the real heart of the Internet. It's the difference between going to Paris to look at the Eiffel tower and then going straight home, or turning off the main street into the backalleys, the side streets, the real city, meeting people, learning their culture, becoming Paris. And hey, you can even look at the Eiffel tower while you're there, if you really want to.