And Ever

Without the Internet, I’d be writing this in a little leatherette book with a cheesy faux lock and no one would ever see it. I like the Internet. It’s basically useful, but people give it too much credit. For the most part, it's more of the same.

You may say you remember what things were like before the Internet, but you don’t, not really. I spent more time without it than with it and I don’t really remember, in much the same way that we don’t call it “history” until long after people wore clothes.

Speaking of naked people before the Internet, there’s always been porn. Videotapes were more revolutionary than the online stuff. For the first time, a perv – sorry, an aficionado -- didn’t have to worry about someone seeing him/her buy a magazine or go into a theater. (Side note: I miss those theaters. The titles were a hoot to drive past.) “Tales of the Arabian Nights” preceded youtube, as the giant annual Sears Roebuck catalogue did Amazon. And people could wipe their asses with the catalogue pages when they were done shopping. Now that’s multitasking.

No, I pretty much only credit the Internet with two things. One is the death of linear conversation. Thanks to Facebook, people now converse in a series of stated facts. It’s boring as hell, which is why I haven’t looked at Facebook in nearly a year. No more ideas developed inductively through complete sentences, no more intelligently allusive humor. My beloved Twitter has me thinking, not just speaking, in non-sequitur aphorisms. If it’s not funny, I don’t take time to make it so, I just move on to the next. Yes, that’s my fault, but the medium makes the message, and the medium is set to full auto rapid-fire.

The Internet is responsible for one other thing, and it’s quite a paradox given that Mr. Warhol’s 15 minutes has been micro-circuited down to 15 seconds. I credit the Internet with the creation (and devaluation) of forever.

Your 15 seconds exists in an ever-evolving perpetuity along with everyone else’s. A sonnet inscribed by a monk on 15th century vellum will decompose. The art of the great masters eventually will be reduced to pixels. But this blog will be here forever and ever, along with those pictures of you from last weekend. Hooray for technology.