Ten reasons why the internet is a horrible place, turning us into idiots
Hello, dear reader. Did you arrive here hoping for a listicle? A GIF-laden article telling you things you already know, to revalidate your existence as a human being? You did? Well then Super Mario, I regret to inform you that your princess is in another castle. For those of you born after 1992, Super Mario is like Call of Duty, but with plumbers. But now that I have your attention, let's talk about why the internet is horrible. Let us also ignore the glaring irony of my using the internet to achieve this.
When the internet was created, I assume there was a room filled with people rejoicing - celebrating one of man's greatest achievements. I imagine there were strippers involved too (because computer geeks don't have girlfriends. Believe me, I know), and why not? The greatest minds of a generation had created a means for people all over the world to communicate, and have a voice! Imagine their dismay three decades on, to find that voice belongs to a lonely boy in Jabalpur commenting on a YouTube video with "lol shutup u are piece of moron bloody gobar hahaha!!1@"
Like it or not, that is the average voice on the internet. Between YouTube hate comments and Instagram posts from 16-year-old girls with 17 hashtags and 18 spelling mistakes, I've come to the conclusion that I'm just too old for the modern-day internet. I feel like my grandfather, waving a cane and babbling to whoever will listen about the good old days when people had actual conversations instead of recycling YouTube comments about how a video about cats gave them cancer.
The internet has turned us into idiots. The average Facebook timeline is a perfect illustration of this. Every meaningful article on the internet is sandwiched between two posts that loosely revolve around "10 reasons why bearded men are sexy". Some perverse temptation led me to click and find out exactly where this bearded sexiness comes from, and it all became quite clear with "Reason Number 5 - They look so sexy". What's depressing is that I'm not even making this up. I'm paraphrasing from a real article from a publication that has over 500,000 Facebook followers. It is genuinely, and unabashedly the lowest common denominator of the internet. The lowest scrape of the online gene pool, and it's this kind of stuff that we lap up and read mindlessly - like Stardust magazines in hospital waiting rooms from the 90s. Those were fun days. I still associate Karishma Kapoor's face with having the flu. (Disclaimer: It has nothing to do with her face).
Those magazines are a thing from the past as well. Nobody reads magazines in waiting rooms because we're slaves to our mobile phones and everyone's tweeting. Eight-year-old kids have Twitter accounts. Why?! What opinion of consequence could an eight-year-old possibly have? "Spilt ma milk 2day. #goo #goo #gaa #gaa"? They can barely spell! Although on second thought that is one of the prerequisites for a Twitter account. But tangible opinions mean nothing on the internet. It's just a rat race for likes, shares and retweets.
"BRO I PUT UP THIS PICTURE OF THIS CRAZY BURGER ON FACEBOOK YESTERDAY."
"Err, that's a vada pav."
"WHO CARES BRO I GOT 45,793 SHARES."
"Do you hear that?"
"NO BRO WHAT?"
"That's the sound of my intellect asphyxiating."
The internet gave us a voice, yes. But we've taken that voice and turned it into a scream - an incessant, deafening scream that lowers the IQ of everything it penetrates. Charles Darwin proposed his theory of natural selection as the way forward, but I don't think he ever accounted for the existence of listicles, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter. As things stand, the evolutionary bus is parked and honking, waiting for us to get on, but mankind couldn't be arsed. He's too busy reading about why bearded men are sexy, while simultaneously typing a hate comment and consummating it with a selfie. Ah, paradise.