*Hollow promise warning*
One of these days I will conduct an internet ‘sit-in’ to prove that someone can now quite comfortably live without ever having to leave their computer desk. Of course by conduct I mean I will make it an official one (notify the police and all that) because of course I’ve been conducting an unofficial internet sit-in for pretty much all of my life. I could quite easily live off of eBay purchases and if I get really desperate for food my wireless modem is edible, which is one of the reasons I signed up to my current IP in the first place. Even if I never get around to an official sit in, I can fairly safely conclude that we have become increasingly dependent on the internet to live our day to day lives. Here are a few of the activities available online that have changed the way we interact with the world.
I somewhat sheepishly admit that I would be hard pressed to successfully transfer money from one of my bank accounts to the other if I physically visited a bank. I would desperately claw at the teller window, mumbling incoherently about a login number and password and trying desperately to locate F5 so I could refresh the page. At this stage I would be asked politely but firmly to please leave so that dear old Mrs Robinson behind me could just bank her weekly pension. Of course, one of the great things about internet banking is that I don’t have to deal with people or queues, and it’s interesting to think that although the internet is a great place for social networking it’s also a great place for friendless hermits to hang out, confident that they don’t have to speak to another soul unless they really want to. Even then, they can do so under the guise of a Japanese schoolgirl, but I digress.
Who uses travel agents anymore? Lots of people, I bet, but those people are idiots. Why would you risk a conversation with an unattractive, overweight and odorous travel agent when you could quite comfortably book your trip with the delightful website models on Virgin Blue? (At this point I will permit you to stop reading for a moment to open a new tab and check out Virgin’s website. P.S. Please be careful searching for ‘virgin flight attendants’; I did so with safe search firmly ‘on’.) In fact I have a theory, and it basically consists of my contention that anything which is detrimental to the internet (spyware, viruses, phishing, Internet Explorer) is actually concocted by the International Association of Travel Agents in an effort to ensure not everybody falls totally in love with the internet and puts them all out of business. Of course this theory makes absolutely no sense if you consider that a lot of travel agents now make squillions in revenue off their websites, but that’s like saying that the theory of relativity makes absolutely no sense if you don’t believe in gravity.
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| Two beautiful people you will never meet in the real world. |
Perhaps less essential but certainly more fun than online banking and travel agents is the Web 2.0 phenomenon of user driven sites. I’ve already devoted one post to Twitter and probably will never get around to one on Facebook (it would be the same as examining your partner of forty years: if you start looking too deep you’d find too many reasons not to love it) but another site dear to my heart that deserves a serious look is YouTube.
YouTube is one of those things where I have no idea how I lived without it. Did I just wait for things I wanted to watch to appear on T.V? What a stupid waste of my time! Now I can spend these unproductive TV watching hours on YouTube, mindfully exploring the plethora of film at my fingertips. In my extensive internet sleuthing I discovered something shocking yet somehow refreshing. Watching Katy Perry’s ‘California Girls’ (for the purposes of educating the masses, of course) I noticed it had around about 40 million hits. Curiosity piqued, I headed over to see how many hits Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech had. Suffice to say YouTube is dominated by teenage girls and dirty old men. (If you really want to know, MLK’s speech had a paltry 9 million hits).
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| Latest YouTube sensation, MLKaty Perry. "I have a dream...a Teenage Dream." |
Wikipedia is one of those websites that doesn’t work in theory. Why would a collaborative encyclopaedia, able to be edited by anyone, ever contain any useful information rather than snide and immature jokes and links to porn sites? But the beauty of Wikipedia is that it does work in practice. It has become so beloved, such a trusted source of information, that people are deeply offended if a page is vandalised and quickly change it back. The most recent example I can think of is when the Melbourne Storm salary cap cheating news story broke. Being a product of my time, I first noticed the information on my news website homepage, and for the next forty-five minutes feverishly refreshed the page, getting all the new information as it came to hand. In between reading the ‘official’ reporting of the event, I headed over to Wikipedia to gauge the reaction. I wasn’t disappointed. I visited the page perhaps ten minutes after the press conference commenced, and the first line had been altered to ‘The Melbourne Storm is a cheating scum rugby club based in Melbourne and participating in the National Rugby league.” Slightly bemused by this hard hitting criticism, I refreshed the page. The words ‘cheating scum’ were gone. Such is the vigilance of the Wiki-police, who refuse to have Wikipedia’s good name besmirched by insolent surfers.
**Interactive blog segment!**
This is the part where you prove to yourself that Wikipedia really does work as a font of all knowledge. Go to a Wikipedia page, and edit it. Be as outrageous (‘Nixon was an alien’) or as subtle (‘Jack Nicklaus won the 1968 US Open by four strokes') as you like; the result will be the same. Your edit will not last 24 hours. Of course there are a few guidelines: What you write must not be true, and you should do it on a page that would get a reasonable amount of hits. (Anybody can get away with having their name written in the middle of the biography section of the third son of the Bulgarian foreign affairs minister during the 1960s, nobody thinks you’re clever.) If your edit lasts longer than 24 hours, write to me, and I will go and check it out (I promise not to re-edit it). If I can find it, then you win a prize.
Meanwhile, I put my money where my mouth is, and slightly changed Australian actor John Howard’s entry, citing that he not only shared his name with a certain former Australian PM, but in fact was the same person:
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| A star-studded career |
Needless to say, it didn't last long.
There is a point to all this online vandalism. If you had explained to George Orwell the concept of Wikipedia, I imagine he would have been quite ecstatic. You see, it’s very hard to have a domineering world-wide state governed by an omnipresent being when people have access to Wikipedia. It appears, from our above observation (and your practical experiment), that it would be incredibly difficult to change world history through Wikipedia because whoever vigorously monitors their favourite Wikipedia pages would never let a morsel of misinformation appear. So then Big Brother has to find other channels of controlling the human race, such as discovering every man’s greatest fear and using this as leverage to gain their allegiance, but I really doubt he can be bothered doing that. In short, the power of knowledge now rests with the people, and it seems that knowledge is so valuable to people that they won’t accept any tomfoolery, virtual or otherwise. When else in human history did the ‘everyday’ population have the ability to compile, compose and refine a knowledge source explored by millions every day?
The above sites are just a small sampling of the wondrous resources the internet has given us. Life without these resources, would, I begrudgingly admit, be possible. But it would not be fun at all. How would we spend our idle hours without the magic of YouTube or add to our already questionable knowledge without Wikipedia? Perhaps we’d have to spend our time reading classic novels or plays, or even (god help us) interacting physically with other human begins. Thank god for Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee.
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