There, I said it, I have no life.
I don’t know why but even though I am quite open to new technologies, when they’re useful that is, I feel that the web is turning into a very strange hurly whirly of virtual “I need to be online all the time with everyone I know and let them know what I do every seconds of my life” thingy, stuff etc..
Now I find that very intrusive and pardon if I might be “Gay” (I am not, but my son use this all the time) but I cannot begin to understand the buzz (and I’ll come to this later) behind this.
I must be getting too old for this stuff (I am 44)
Back in the days, about 15 years ago, the Web was great, things were simple; you didn’t get (much) spam, most things were free and the information was more or less useful.
Today the web is turning into an ugly beast, [much too] full of useless stuff drowning the useful stuff. The useful stuff is usually no longer free though, this can be a good thing, but it tends to become a little silly most times.
In 1996 I watched a TV program about the web, and there was an interview of an artist from around L.A. I think, and he said (roughly):
“The creativity that is allowed to be broadcast to the world via the web will soon be locked down and that will be the death of the Web; the commercial world will take over and that will be it! Snap! All will no longer be free, that will be it, the web will be dead, and the good times will be gone forever”
This, I think, happened more than 5 years ago.
Today the web can be and still is very useful, but it’s getting harder to sort the weed from the chaff.
I have problems with this and I am a veteran, so imagine what it does to people who’ve never been on the web until today, like 3-4-5 years old kids or even people in their 60-70’s who can barely understand a Computer to start with, and could potentially find themselves in front of a page that says “Your computer is infected”* on their first hour of web browsing.
What kind of message is that giving out? The web is crap… and don’t trust it, but then it’s usually too late, I am afraid to say, the poor sod is reduced to pay criminals.
That frightens/worries me slightly.
I do have kids, 3 boys and they are, fortunately, in their teens now and quite frankly very nice chaps; they were given unrestricted and, god forbid, unsupervised access to the Web since they were about that age. But I am glad it was 10 years ago! Now I would not be so sure. All they were interested about was, and still is, gaming.
To come back to the Buzz, about all this, and the reason that prompted me to write this, is the arrival of Google “Buzz” in my Gmail, which I promptly hid.
You see a couple of months ago, I signed up to Facebook and other Plaxo “social websites”, the latter to reconnect with long lost friend in my country of origin (Switzerland) and the former just to see what all the fuss was about.
Plaxo was useful to initiate contact, and Facebook, Well, I stuck a couple of photos on, talked about my hobby (Motor biking) and lost interest pretty much after 3 weeks, I since disabled it. I find it an utter waste of time and, as I previously said, having no life does not help, sorry, my wife uses it for business and she’s got more of a life than me.
I also opened a Twitter account, this also has been falling in the way side, after the only thing I was writing on it is “Typing this on this site” (Well it asks you what you’re doing RIGHT NOW isn’t it?). It became quite boring after a short while, so apart from posting some links explaining what I think of Twitter/Facebook/Bebo etc. I don’t bother.
Maybe one day when I have a life and more friends I will use these again, but at present I don’t find them at all interesting, but that’s just me.
I have no life, remember?
What I do find still a little useful are Discussion Forums, so I guess I am finding myself being part of a forgotten generation that died many, many Web Moons ago.
I don’t know if it’s just me that believe all this? Surely not! There must be people that have better things to do out there than Tweeting and Book their face? Maybe it’s a fad?
Yes, it’s a fad.
It’s got to be…
On to the next thing, I might start “Blogging” more, something I really never though much about… You never know.
Boot note:
Please Google don’t mess up the Web, it’s still a great place to be on.
Will it still be in 10 years time? I guess I’ll have to wait and see.
Maybe I’ll get that lost life back as well.
* You know the bogus website tricking you to think you’re really infected, when you’re not… This is actually quite comical when I discover that my Linux machine has got 100’s of infected “dll” and “exe” files! (I have been using Linux as my OS of choice since 2003)