The interweb started out as this way for various military and academic groups to collaborate on projects. It was a way for data, thoughts, and theories to be exchanged very quickly to further the expanse of knowledge and expedite its acquisition – prior to this happening people had to use Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) to do this which was tedious, slow, and irritating. Once the interweb went mainstream everything changed – first came silly stupid web sites with very poor design and next to know purpose. People followed the methodology of stumble fumble regroup to get a site up and had a hodge podge topsy turvey way of making said site functional – however in its raw stage at that point it was incredibly entertaining – it had a way of sucking us in.

People started to get savvy, technology expanded, developers went from old school to web specific – specialized for the interwebs. With this came new websites with a singular focus – MAKE MONEY. That is right, marketing wizards (I don’t agree with this statement but it is the mainstream belief of what occurred) got involved and showed the nerd nation what their technology can really do – make money. Things exploded into the DotCom era of our history – a time when practically anyone (expect me apparently) could get funding for a company and make godrillions of dollars to only spend it all on fruitless activities (Boo.com anyone?)  ultimately leading everyone down a dismal path of destruction. We all know how that ended – the DotCom bubble burst – suicides and wanna be killing rampages were to follow. The aftermath left people wanting more, and allowed those who didn’t fail to rise to a new level of power.

Google was born. Today they are taking over the world.

Something else arose from the ashes, something amazing, something powerful,  something incredibly narcissistic: Social Networking. There were many early versions that all failed miserably on some level, then came Myspace.com – a website first designed for musicians to share their music and network became a social networking beast for anyone. The problem was they let people do whatever they wanted to within their system, and thus the masses broke its intention, turning it into a graphics and layout competition. The point was lost. Facebook.com did exactly what Myspace.com did, but without the frills, and the catch was all those frills being removed made it better. The mistake of letting people do whatever they want created chaos, and chaos in social networking is bad, thus the genius (apparently there is a debate that there is more than one) behind Facebook.com dwindled it all down to a few simple things:

1. People want to connect with other people
2. People love to talk about themselves
3. People love to talk about other people

The best part here is people love to do those things about absolutely nothing. Facebook.com exploded to such a degree that the youngest self made billionaire was born: Zuckerberg. Now some 300 million people are friends with each other (I personally have lots of Facebook friends that I don’t even know IRL) and they all take their separate turns telling each other stuff about themselves that nobody really cares about but they all pretend they do – like ‘Made chicken for dinner.” and “Going to the dentist.”

This gave birth to another phenomena - Twitter.com. Apparently the act of logging into Facebook and having to deal with an interactive community was just too much for some people – they couldn’t handle the pressure – when all they really wanted to do was have a way to talk about themselves to anyone who would listen. Facebook.com was a community, a fake one in many aspects, but it was one, and that creates undo pressure on the members of that community. So if you could talk about yourself with zero recourse or direct interaction with anyone, and those who were dumb enough to subscribe to your random thoughts and quotes would get spoon fed a constant stream of 140 characters of complete nonsense from you. Narcissism has reached its pinnacle – hasn’t it?

No. The new up and coming craze is the art of doing live video feeds of yourself on the web doing… well.. anything. My niece did  a bit where she walked with a friend through  a Walmart just talking – and people were watching her channel. Was she dancing naked? Nope. Was she teaching anyone anything? Not one iota. Just walking, and shopping and she had subscribers. Ah sweet narcissism had graduated to a new level – we have become so self involved and so self important that we truly believe others are interested in watching us shop, eat, walk, and sit.

Now for the really stupid – FiveOClockCharlie just walked in and told me that people are buying a magic spell to make their butt smaller for $8.95 from a witch on the internet. If that works, anything else will. What a tragedy.