Omniscient Omnipotent Web
Yes, I did study computer science – I confess apologetically, yet again, to the utter amazement of my cooler interlocutors – historians, musicians… even mathematicians will do, but compskies!
For computer scientists are like camels – with a hunch or two growing out of a zigzag backbone and an unrelenting perseverance in digging across the wavy sands of a contemporary desert – the Omniscient Omnipotent Web…
Ironically, it’s a desert that more and more people are swarming into, creating their own pieces of ‘webspace’, joining in virtual, and therefore, alas!, how unstable and sandy!, groups, societies, making acquaintances such as FF (Facebook friends), that are being collected like stamps, put into a virtual list to fill in the numbers and add to one’s popularity status:
238 friends equals 238 clicks, 238 times of pressing the key, ‘enter’, or a mouse on its right ear, 238 clicks, can u imagine?! That almost adds up to the length of Beethoven’s ‘Kreutzer Sonata’, but turned exceedingly modern – a deafening sound of a keyboard providing more and more faces rolling into our ‘private’ Facebook collections. I’m not the first, and certainly not the last one, with my skeptical view on Facebook’s impact on our lives. Recently the archbishop of Westminster voiced a harsh critique on the quality of FF(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8180115.stm), on the transience and superficiality of Facebook’s friendships, on the degeneration of human contacts into the contact of photos, of walls, of ever-smiling faces, of virtual ghosts…
I am one of those faces, naturally, don’t get me wrong. I change my face every now and then, as the habit goes, to show my FF(Facebook friends) I’m entertaining an indefatigable personal development which has to be documented online – with an exciting profile picture, a change of status…Now this website will, hopefully, provide me with a better way of personality documentation.
There is an old Polish saying ‘talking to him is like casting peas against a wall’. Nowadays we cast words against each other’s Facebook walls. The contemporary peas sound: how are you? Great thank u! They taste just as insipid.
Despite the stormy intro this is not to be the site of continuous down pour of heart-rending lamentation, a granny’s humming ‘in my age everything used to be better’, nor a ravaged attack on the virtual space. But it will be a slight attack on the part of the OOW (remember? – Omnicient Omnipotent Web) which is indeed like a desert, for despite the crowds with a status ‘available’ and a green light incessantly flashing by the log-in nickname, the internet had in fact impoverished us. It has created a desert of individuals who claim ties with one another but, in fact, shun human contact.
But let’s not panic, for the state is still repairable, even if urgent, and this is where I see my modest mission – to put the web in its right place, to make it serve, not deceive us, to further human contact, not to replace it.
Right, so here I am at the end of my anti-web tirade, ironically, writing it out on the very same distasteful keyboard I felt repelled by a few lines ago and in front of the very same lurid screen that I crushed in words before but wipe out clean with a tablecloth now…but one is certain, I switch it off now, and storm outside to the pub to see my friends, the whole bodies not just faces! To play pool, to hit the ball, and to hit it again (for, sadly, one shot is never enough)…and this is what I will be doing here as well, hitting things I don’t like about the new-age machine and embracing the ones I like – rejecting contact via internet but making the most of internet’s computational abilities and so on and on…till people get bored and throw apples at me. But I will merely laugh for they’ll be virtual apples I am sure and wont’ hurt…there are good bits in the worst mud….
The good bit is this is the end…the bad – for today…;)
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SteveC
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markez linda