Geekery

3 of the Many Reasons Why the Internet is Depressing

Posted on 16. Oct, 2009 by Jake in Unusual

Once upon a time, in the olden days, if you wanted any new information you had to ride by horseback to the next town to talk to its wisest men and risk being attacked by a sabre tooth tiger in the process. Now we have all the info we could possibly want at the click of a mouse and what do we spend our precious time doing? Searching for pics of Britney Spears flashing her panties, that’s what. Instead of ushering in an age of knowledge, the internet is instead a celebration of human stupidity, and I’m sure I’m not the only geek out there who finds this a tad depressing. Here are some examples…

Reason no. 1:
People who shouldn’t be famous
There are a whole bunch of them. The Numa Numa kid filmed himself on a webcam badly miming to a crap Eurovision pop song and became an icon. The Star Wars kid ran around on camera making a fool out of himself with a makeshift lightsaber and gained similarly instant fame. Mahir Cagri, a Turkish guy who must have been the inspiration behind Sasha Baron Cohen’s character Borat, became internationally recognised just for propositioning women in Broken English. The Tourist Guy found fame when he was deep etched and placed on a bunch of dangerous situations and locally, a similar idea turned humble (if strangely dressed) wait-lifter Cassie Booyse into Vernon Koekemoer. And Vincent Van Gogh died, unknown, after selling one painting in his entire lifetime. Depressed yet?

Reason no. 2:
LolCats and ROFLCats
Whether you go to lolcats.com, roflcats.com or icanhascheezburger.com you will be met with the same thing – pictures of cats being unnecessarily cute with a pathetic pidgin internet English caption tacked onto it. The phenomenon was started when Eric Nakagawa found the original I Can Has Cheeseburger pic on the net and started the site of the same name. As if any proof were needed that people are mostly very stupid, the site soon had millions of hits a day. Countless imitations, including LOLDogs and, far more disturbingly, LOLBums, now exist. While we like to think we are more intelligent than animals, the fact that they don’t sit around on Photoshop making ROFLPeople suggests it’s the other way round.

Reason no. 3:
Very bad things
There are sites on the internet hosting things so disgusting that they make you question the humanity as a whole. These range from the bizarrely amusing (example – Cakefart.com, which literally is exactly what its name says it is) to the utterly diabolical, the kind of thing it one watches out of morbid curiosity and then has to work through in therapy for years afterwards. Famous examples include Goatse.com, LemonParty.org and, worst of all, the infamous 2 Girls One Cup. I will not describe the content of any of these sites to you and, if you visit any of them, I take no responsibility whatsoever for any psychological damage caused. All I know is that after viewing any one of these clips it is hard to argue that makind is inherently good.
PS: I have mercifully decided not to provide any links on this one

Tags: borat, britney spears, Cell C, eurovision, geekery, internet, lolcats, mahir cagri, numa numa, star wars, stupidity, vernon koekemoer