by Luke Nihlen
Daily Lobo columnist
While playing "World of Warcraft" late one evening, I wondered whether I was wasting the Internet.
This thought was spurred by finding myself a part of one of those insipid Internet chats. Admit it, you know what I'm talking about - you've been sucked in at least once. You know, that kind of conversation that seems to take place only in public Internet forums - a conversation simultaneously stupid and compelling. It is so offensive in its vacuity that it wraps around the axis from negative infinity in usefulness and arrives back somehow at "urgently demanding your response." In "World of Warcraft," we call it Barrens Chat, named for a location of that virtual world infamous for its cadre of asinine social theorists.
Upon consideration, the irony of the prevalence of such discourse is dizzying. The Internet is a miracle of human cooperation, the ultimate refutation of the cynical attitude exemplified by the bitter engineer's quip "the camel is a horse designed by committee."
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Seriously, what else works so well in all the rest of global affairs? For example, the United States has a trade embargo against Cuba, and opinions vary wildly as to the justness of this policy. Regardless, I as an American can rent a car in Havana from my home in Albuquerque over the Internet - the carefully synchronized dance of close to a billion computers. And yes, it was and is designed by committee.
And yet, what do we do with this $60-per-month high-speed revolution? Well, on a Friday evening, you might find me wearing the skin of a beautiful athletic female blue elf with giant ears, trying to pick an elusive virtual flower known to grow only on a certain virtual mountain while trying to avoid being dragged into a discussion about gender politics or homophobia or racism with a bunch of horny caffeine-, marijuana-, and alcohol-addled American teenage boys. That is, if I'm not trolling for pictures of naked humans on the Web.
According to a study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, regular Internet users have larger and stronger social networks then non-Internet users, and can transition seamlessly from interaction over the Internet to more traditional modes without awkwardness. Personally, I'd like to see their focus group. There's something exhilarating about the anonymity of scale granted by the Internet - like tourists from the suburbs in New York City, many recognize it as an opportunity to act like a jerk.
Yes, there's our old human darkness on the net too; technology is a mirror, and technology is a lens. Congressional staffs edit the information about our representatives to remove criticism in the free and supposedly democratic Wikipedia. The Recording Industry Association of America is suing little girls who like pop music and can figure out how to use file-sharing.
I guess I had just hoped for more.
Let me build you a metaphor. A lot of Internet believers sound like 1960s hippies to me.
Hippies had hope - hope that there could be a better way, a free way. I remember telling my wife that the Internet was the best hope for humanity.
The flower children had a loose definition of personal property. We have open-source technology that can be infinitely shared.
They had their mind-bending orgies, and we had Napster.
The rebels four decades ago had the Minutemen, and we had Mitnick.
The law frowned on both of us.
And where are they now? Still following members of those now defunct bands around? Wrestling with substance abuse? Are things ever as simple as they seemed when you were young? Google - slogan: "Don't be evil" - censors their searches for Chinese citizens. Is it more imperialist that they are there in the first place, or that they bowed to the Chinese government's will?
I study organic gardening online, and I appreciate the natural scenery photographs that are also prevalent in the windowless offices of our national laboratory, which detonates bombs in cyberspace to cut down on overhead.
We're so beautiful, so amazingly diverse, so dark and horrible. But I'm wasting your time. I'm not a social theorist - my field is technology. Let's not discuss this. After all, I'm waiting for my flower to respawn.
