Fear of Internet

Here's an article from my friend on how he view the internet. He's a workaholic...staring the computer monitor all day.

The Internet is evil

I think the Internet is the devil's creation. I really do. I mean, where else does it happen where you just log on to check your e-mail and before you know it, it's five in the morning, you haven't slept a wink, and you still have to go to work in about two hours? You show up at the office with a pair of Louis Vuitton hand carry under your eyes and sit down at your desk to find.what else.another Internet-enabled computer, whispering seductive nothings for you to fire up that Firefox for another spin on the information superhighway. Thankfully, you have that teetering pile onthe inbox demanding some attention to take your mind away from the temptation but it's a temporary reprieve, a pit stop, before the insidious voice of the Internet demon takes over your will and gets you roaring down the fast lane to the worldwide web once more. Hypnotic and beguiling, it has the mesmerizing effect that Teletubbies have on toddlers and is just as sinister as Tinky Winky with his pwetty wittle handbag.

Newbies to the world of the Internet are particularly susceptible to its fiendish charms and wiles. Remember the time when the Net was still this newfangled creation, when people used it just for email and to do research? You go to a website and, while poring over material that you need for your report on phosphorylation, your pointy cursor would transform into a small hand when hovering over an innocent looking link on How to Have a Rockin' Date. Being the naïve person that you are, you think “What is this?” and click on it, opening yet another window to a topic totally unrelated to what you are looking for. You move your cursor to the “X” button to close it but, as you do so, you see another topic about some guy in Tibet making it to the Guinness Book of World Records and you click on it, opening yet another window with yet more links to even more fascinating topics, ad infinitum. Before you know it, you have some 25 windows open on your desktop, the original window on phosphorylation buried beneath stacks of unrelated subjects. That's not even taking into account the deluge of pop-up ads that would suddenly, well, pop up all over your screen, much like mushrooms after a heavy rain. (This was in the days before the pop-up ad blockers and anti-scripting software). After about eight hours on the Net, you know more about who is doing what to whom in Hollywood than about the introduction of a phosphate group into an organic molecule.

And then you stumbled into the world of chat, opening up an entirely new way of hitting on total strangers. ASL (age, sex, location) became your new mantra, quickly followed by LOL and all its monstrous hybrids-“ROFL” (rolling on the floor laughing), “LMAO” (laughing my ass off), and BWL (bursting with laughter), among hundreds of variations. I mean, c'mon, how many ways can one actually laugh? Before the Internet, there was only one way to do it. Well, two, if you count the difference between hahahaha and HAHAHAHA. By the time you memorized all the variations on how to say you're amused, you've been logging some eight to 10 hours everyday in chat rooms, the circles under your eyes have become permanently tattooed to your face, and you need a separate black book to keep track of all the handles you've invented to keep your real friends away from your Internet “friends”.

And who doesn't hate Google, huh? Before this Internet behemoth came along, millions of college students got away with plagiarizing whole sections of books for their essays and thesis reports and got glowing grades in return for their efforts. Now, you just plug in a paragraph or sentence into the search box and you get inundated with hundreds of pages of documents and videos showing identical tags (complete with a smug little number at the top showing you how long it took to round up those pages for you). What are students and aspiring writers to do? Come up with original ideas? Heaven forbid!

I'm not even talking here of that monstrosity called spam mail: people wanting to show me their naked pictures, or the millions in lottery winning that I have waiting for me in some foreign banks, or medicine that's supposed to make my, uh, “goods” bigger (Oh, wait, I better save that for future reference). I spend an average of about 15 minutes everyday just clearing my Inbox of these scum.

Of course, after a while, the magic fades. You acquire a natural immunity to it and the Internet reverts back to what it is, a mere tool. That, however, is not going to be the end of it. Oh no. Like the crafty devil that it is, the Internet has an embarrassment of riches in tricks designed to keep you hooked to the Web. You'll never understand what I'm talking about until you've tried StumbleUpon. It's this nifty extension for your Firefox, a cute button sitting oh so innocently on the left side of the browser, its diminutive size belying its preternatural power to keep sleep at bay. It's more efficient than five espresso shots and as viciously addicting as heroine in its capacity to keep you going and going and going. Unfortunately, I was an active proponent of StumbleUpon, an unwitting pusher seeking company for my addiction. How was I to know? It is ingenuously marketed as a tool that brings you to websites that you'd normally not visit or find but that's the catch, because it filters what you find interesting or not and before you know it, you're clicking away like mad, entranced at the richness and variety of the web experience and, oh, wait, I'm supposed to be trashing it. Sorry. For a moment there I thought I needed intervention.

So, yes, it is evil. It robs you of your sleep, makes you drink too much coffee, has much too much information for your own good, and is altogether too obliging to provide you with whatever your twisted little mind wants to know or find out. It's bad news all around and if you can stay away from it the better. (Jayvee Vallejera)