Y'Know What I Hate? The Internet

Two thousand years of progress and the pinnacle of mankind’s achievement online is a website with photos of Paris Hilton looking like she was beaten by a former boyfriend. I am not an intellectual by any stretch of the imagination, but what is stunning to me is the amount of garbage there is floating around on the Internet.

On any given day you are bombarded with ads for penis enlargement, hit with spyware, and receive messages from some person in Africa claiming to be a prince that wants to share his fortune with you. I recently saw an advertisement from a company telling me to click on the banner to remove advertisements on my computer. My response and yours should always the same to this bombardment of substandard waste. Run Lavasoft's Ad-Aware when finished surfing the net, try your best to shield your eyes from the ads, tell the guy from Liberia his check is in the mail, and if necessary ask the good people at the “Rhino Penis Company” how much they want.

The sites I go to, when I am done with that cavalcade of gallstone-inducing madness that is my email account, are the news sites. I get my news, maybe a few cheap laughs, and then I sign off. Not as exciting as, say, putting a stick of dynamite down my throat and trying to put out the fuse before it blows, but this kills time and keeps me sharp. I never know when someone is going to regurgitate what he or she saw on the news and misinterpret it to make a point in an argument. You should never believe everything you read, and you should not form an opinion on something without all the facts. Just because The Age makes things up does not mean you should either.


Every website out there looks exactly the same. Almost all of the sites that I have had a chance to check out were either a cheap knock off of a popular site, or the site amounted to another Norman Rockwell who took their PHP mastery or some such nonsense, gave it a sleek "look at me I'm a nerd" design, and piled on everything they thought they could that would get people to go to their site.

Now you have blogs popping up everywhere like a foot rash. I loathe blogs because most of the time it is some unqualified, blithering, teenager yapping endlessly about what they think about Julia Gillard or waxing philosophical on such intellectual matters as whether to scratch their behind with the left or right hand. And then of course you have the blogs that just focus on celebrities and offer snarky comments that a 3-year-old chimp named Ooka could top. And yes, I am all too aware that I sit comfortably in this category.

The media needs to stop their love affair with blogs and “citizen journalists.” There is too much danger in this flash journalism style that people will be harmed.

It seems to me we have been on a downward spiral in terms of what we expect for entertainment and the Internet reflects our low standards. So I say go to your usual sites, stay informed so you don’t turn into a blithering blogger, and for the love of everything holy run some kind of spyware protection when you are done.