Around eleven years ago, a dorky-looking Quebecois kid named Ghyslain decided to film himself re-enacting lightsaber battles from his favorite sci-fi movie with a golf ball retriever. You've probably seen it: the stick twirls, the mouthed lightsaber sound effects, the stumbles, the trips, and so on. Forever known as the Star Wars kid, Ghyslain and his video were uploaded to the internet by some mean-spirited students and went on to become the most watched video on the internet. Ever. The Star Wars kid video has been watched nearly a billion times. ONE FUCKING BILLION TIMES.
I admit it, it is a pretty funny video. But what about Ghyslain? Well, he had to drop out of school. Go through years of therapy. To this day he most likely endures stifled laughter as he walks through mall hallways. His life is changed forever.
We live in a world where we can instantly upload any piece of media, idea, or feeling within seconds. This information can then be seen by virtually anyone in the world with an internet connection, a notion which I heralded as a great thing for humanity in my last entry. But at what cost?
Today, I fear for myself in social situations involving cameras. What if someone captures a revealing, unphotogenic picture of myself and puts it on Facebook? What if I make some sort of social gaffe and an acquaintance with an Iphone and dreams of making it big on Youtube gets it all on (digital) celluloid? It happens to thousands of people a day. And we happily consume this media with excitement, laughter, and a desire to share the entertainment with others. When the clip ends, we move on. It's only a matter of time before some other buffoon attempts to do a backflip, fails miserably, and must in turn endure the schadenfreude of people around the globe.
In the 60's, Andy Warhol famously exclaimed that "in the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes." And he was absolutely right. But what we don't see is what happens to these people after their fifteen minutes are up. For many, they probably end up a lot like Ghyslain.
Beyond the celebration and easy accessibility of embarrassment that the internet has spawned, it has also given everyone a (somewhat false) sense of anonymity. With the popularization of online message boards, comment sections on news stories and blogs, and the lack of a need (or, perhaps desire) to formally identify yourself, the internet has bred a special type of cynical, confrontational, and extremely vocal minority of people appropriately named trolls.
Trolls are found everywhere on the web: they are the ones telling you that the song you wrote is terrible and that you should die in a fire. They just need to tell you why your favorite movie is garbage. They are the ones picking apart a myriad of news stories, berating both the author and the article's subject. Oh, and they're the people you don't recognize on your favourite social network; the ones who you've never met before but still need to ask if 'u mad, bro?' after they antagonize you with a disparaging comment. Most importantly, they don't have a name, a face, or any sort of physical presence to associate your disdain for them with. It's this anonymity that makes trolling so common. Perhaps trolls see their activities as cathartic. Or simply as a time-killer. Maybe it's a way for people to vent their innate need to be confrontational, without having to do so in real life.
Whatever the cause, for most people, trolling sucks. The majority of us know better than to take the mischief of trolls with anything other than a grain of salt, but it doesn't stop us from nonetheless being hurt by their nature. We may not agree with the raving, often illogical rants of why your favorite television show is awful by some teenager in his basement (whom, I might add, is probably not that different from our friend Ghyslain), but it is enough to plant a seed of doubt: maybe LOST wasn't as great a TV show as I once thought.
It is perhaps the smarminess of trolls that makes them so irritating. The unwarranted self-assuredness that whatever they say is as concrete as the word of God. This leads to my final point on why the Internet sucks: it has enflamed our own vanity and sense of importance.
I recently came to the realization that Facebook has extensively documented the last four years of my life. We could debate for months how accurate it is in its depiction of myself as a human being, but the point is that virtually anyone can check me out and get a general sense of how my life has played out over the last few years. But really, why should anyone care?
A person can post the most mundane of status updates on Facebook ("OMG, I FINALLY FOUND THAT PENCIL I WAS LOOKING FOR FOR THE LAST TEN MINUTES") and within minutes there will be a handful of "likes," replies, and congratulations from friends, acquaintances, and even total strangers. The rise in popularization of social networking and the supposed necessity of having an online presence has given us all a false sense of importance. If that photo I uploaded of myself at the game gets a bunch of comments from friends telling me how cute I look, well, it just has to be true.
So yeah, you could google "dildo origins" and it would only take a few minutes before you were an expert on the subject. But I bet on the way to that answer, some asshole will tell you that dildos are only for dykes or that they're a tool of the devil.
