The five o five : Wednesday, Octobober 31, 2007

Make Believe

I M A G I N A R Y
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Now I don't debate the fact that there are real people behind each cartoon avatar that appears on his friends list. Nor do I doubt that these animated representative are sponsored on the other end of the high speed cable by true emotion, invested by real human beings (or very intelligent cats).
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Well so far so good readers. You probably thought that this little experiment would have crashed and burned by now but it still treks on. Even though gas is $2.99 a gallon I still have enough momentum to coast this bad boy to the finish line, SO THERE.

Now with that out of the way every one all together now, "WHO CARES!"

Right? I mean this is the freakin' internet for god sakes. Its not real. Its an imaginary world of make believe. Sure it has its lists of benefits but in the end what is it all worth really?

Can you imagine future civilizations discovering humanities lost ruins? Can you picture our shiny pc cases littering the ancient earth landscape? This entire internet universe would be completely invisible to them. All they would see is that we kept these mystical plastic boxes in our dwelling spaces for worship, storage, and possibly to ward off evil spirits. You remember how long it took for us to decipher the Rosetta Stone. So how much longer would it take to unlock the complexities of a Gateway Convertible CX210X?

There is a recurring debate I have with a friend of mine over how serious he takes the internet. He logs on daily to one of those popular internet social networking sites (need I say the name) and he visits with "friends", reviews their comments and replies to their utter, tacky, glittery non sense, as though they were real words. Now I don't debate the fact that there are real people behind each cartoon avatar that appears on his friends list. Nor do I doubt that these animated representative are sponsored on the other end of the high speed cable by true emotion, invested by real human beings (or very intelligent cats). I do argue, however, the level of emotion he should invest in responding to these imaginary people in this imaginary universe. It usually goes like this:

Someone send him a message with a few questionable items of inquiry and he responds with honest frustration as though they were standing right before him in the same room. He pounds on the keys and shakes his head with a dull angry grimace as though the idiot on the other end will digitally receive his expression. He smashes down the "CAPS LOCK" key and peppers the screen with as many exclamations as can fit in the response box hoping that they get the point.

I M A G I N A R Y
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I know most people would want to live near MySpace, or Google. I would probably live down the street from Blospot just around the corner from E-Bay.
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All this wasted energy, I argue, shot into an endless void of ones and zeros! The person on the other end (or cat) can just as easily hit delete and never see that he replied or they can open it, read it and completely misinterpret his reply as some creative form of "asci text art" artistically devised for their enjoyment.

The internet is not real. Nothing here truly exist. It is only the representation of all thing real. It is a virtual catalog of reality itself. That's was what it was built for [link]. It was devised to hold all of our "Back up information" but for some reason we are trying are hardest to traverse fully into the digital realm.

What if we could really live in cyber space? Not like how the matrix did it but what if we could somehow digitize our physical form and build a quaint little house somewhere along the edge of the internet super highway. I can imagine how much more junk mail I would have to sort through. I can picture how many unwanted guest I would need to dodge. I can see some benefits though. Travel would be faster. Everyone could look however they wanted to look without surgical procedures and scaring. And.... That's about it. I know most people would want to live near MySpace, or Google. I would probably live down the street from Blospot just around the corner from E-Bay. We would all get along swell until the lag hits us. Did you forget about that? Or instead of burglars breaking into you house and stealing your T.V. we would have to worry about a skilled hacker stealing our house and spamming us with porn and Viagra pop ups (get it?). This is not the world I wanna live in.

So I tell my friend, almost everyday it seems. "The internet is not real, the internet is not real, the internet is not real." The good news is that at the end of the day we can shut down our browsers. We can log out of our operating system. And finally we can press off.

Read the follow up question to this post on Yahoo! Answers