July 2008 Archives

I'm an old-timer on the Internet - not so ancient as the Bulletin Board posters of the early 90s, but old enough to remember when AOL was a walled garden and all the links fit on one page. The internet was so big then: full to the brim with tiny sites featuring fun games and comedic rants. For the lonely and isolated (like me), it was a way of reaching out and finding new families - best friends we would never have met, constrained as we were by physical location and social habits. When the late 90s rolled around and commercialism seized the internet, we complained that the fun places were being drowned out by the big brands. You couldn't find Barbie parodies anymore, or teasing twists of trademarked phrases like "Ham, the Other White Meat," because those companies were sending out lawsuits left and right. But then things turned around a bit with blogs and MySpace and the connections people started making in the Oughts. Web 2.0 was all about bringing people together, about making collaborations and virtual families. The internet became a world where we could socialize even better than the local coffee shop.

But I think something's gone very wrong. And - admittedly - this may just be me being old and missing the point, but it seems to me that instead of becoming a place where people who don't fit in can find a niche where they belong, the internet has ballooned into a giant clique where the nonconformists are more scorned and isolated than ever. Blogging is a popularity contest and - for all I love to read Dooce and the like - as a consequence, the less popular are dropping off the map, drowned out and never seen. Instead of connecting by setting up a little home on LiveJournal or Flickr, you just get told every day how incredibly worthless and undeserving of companionship you are, staring at that zero counter month after month.

And the senior clique? They are more confident than ever that they are all the world needs to hear. The way the internet en masse attacks movies like The Crystal Skull, while blithely ignoring the other monumental failures of the genre. The way everyone reads the same books (from Harry Potter to Y: The Last Man). The way everyone knows the same celebrity gossip and CuteOverload vocabulary. You are either in, or you are out (and yes, they all watch Project Runway and blog their reality TV picks with zest).

And I've always been an outsider.

I wander the internet now and it's entertaining enough in a sugary sort of way, like green Jell-o for my morning doldrums. But it's all so same-y and predictable. Occasionally I find a new site that makes me laugh, but it wears off after a few months. I read odd books and wish I had someone to talk to about them. Someone who doesn't like Star Trek or SG-1 or Harry Potter. I wish I had a smaller community of artists where I could feel like I wasn't at the losing end of insignificant.

And I guess that's the real problem there. There are over 6 billion people on the planet, and more of them get on the internet everyday. And - as in real life - there are more desperate-to-fit-in sheep joining up than lonely outsiders. Maybe it was different once, maybe it was smaller and more selective. But it's not. The world's not. And we can't be special anymore. Even the statistical uniqueness of our fingerprints is about to disappear up against that huge number of people. And I don't know how to accept that.

I'm looking at the piece of fairy cake and I just can't grasp how very small I am.