As this is my first post to Senor Patrick's blog, I decided to ask his advice for a first entry. The first few ideas were nothing but adolescent self-gratifying giggle-fests, but finally Patrick struck gold. The resulting "golden idea" has led the way to the following article on a somewhat serious topic, especially serious in this day and age. For my icebreaker of an article, I'll broach the subject of the e-world and the decline in the average Joe's social life.
The best opener would most obviously be the increased use of social networking sites, the earliest and most widely known being Myspace, only predated by Friendster. For those of you who are unaware of what exactly Myspace is, first get out from under that rock. Second, Myspace was the first social networking site to really bring social networking into the average persons life. It was developed sometime in 2003 and at its peak had numbers easily in the hundreds of millions. Myspace garnered such a large following that even tech savvy businesses soon had their own pages to advertise then subsequently inform and get in touch with their customers and fellow business partners. Musicians and musical groups also made up a very large number of the Myspace user pool. But like any good pool, someones got to come along and pee in it. The metaphorical pee in the pool would be Facebook.
Myspace looked up and shouted, "More users please!". Facebook whispered, "Facebook: No. about 5 minutes ago Comment Like." Facebook came into the world with what amounts to a drunken, emo blog post. It all originated with "Facesmash", a Harvard University version of "Hot or Not". An inebriated frat boy, distraught over the loss of his latest piece of tail, blogged about his failed sexual exploit. He whined to the empty data streams that some of the people at his school weren't very good looking and developed Harvard Thermogenic or Nay (or some other namby pamby sounding alternative), using pictures and personal information from fellow students (after hacking the school database to aquire his materials). This later evolved into TheFacebook and eventually dropped "The" becoming the site we all know and love, Facebook. Since its release, Facebook as roared to the top, garnering a following of approximately 400 million users, leaving Myspaces 130 million users wondering, "Why the hell am I not on Facebook?". Beat that World of Warcraft.
The pros of these sites are actually pretty appealing. You can meet people with similar interests, keep in touch with friends and family in other parts of the world, even find a love interest. I myself use Facebook and dabbled with Myspace back in the day as a means to socialize with some old friends in another state, keep in touch with friends who've moved, tell people interesting things I've been doing (a la Twitter? I think not!), and so on. If you're in a band, creating a Facebook page is definitely a good move, or if you've got a business. Many businesses have their own Facebook page (Valve, NewEgg, Nvidia, to name a few that I follow) and post updates on new products, promotions, contests, etc. There can't be anything bad about that right? I mean, it's got the word "social" right in the name! Right?
I text. I email. I IM. I chat through Skype with my microphone and webcam. We all do these things and many of us lead very active and healthy social lives away from the internet. But consider what the internet has done. It's made keeping in contact easier. It's made accessing information easier. It's made obtaining music, games, movies, software, easier. Shopping? Pfft, internet's got this. I've ordered pizza online a few times before. If you wanted to, you could order groceries online. Anything you want, it can be obtained with a few clicks and a pretty plastic card with your name and a long string of numbers on it. In essence, WE LOVE YOU INTERNET!
Sadly, the good old days are gone. I used to write my grandmother letters, telling her how I am, how schools been (conveniently forgetting my suspensions), all the fun I'm having with friends (friends = TV), and so on. I'd fold the letter carefully, slide it into the envelope, slap a stamp on that bad boy, mess up writing grandmas address 80 times, then throw it in the mailbox. And wait. When that response letter finally came, I was a bundle of anticipation. I'd rip open that envelope and smile, reading all about how my grandma was doing, how she missed me, and how glad she was that I was doing well in school (little did she know). That's all gone now. She emails me cute cats, funny pictures, and silly jokes. Just like everyone else. The anticipation is gone, the effort is gone. Just funny cat after funny cat. I can has good old days plz?
Remember game night? Yeah, you do. Dad would make everyone stay home for game night. After dinner he'd whip out Monopoly, Guess Who?, Sorry, Scrabble, or D&D for some good ol' fashioned family fun! Guess what? I wipe the floor with my dad in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Yeah, that's right. I pwn his n00b ass. Camping bitch deserves it. All right, I lied, my dad doesn't play COD:MW2. But you know what, he's thought about it, and I'll be damned if we wouldn't play. I'm a gamer nerd, I'll admit it. I used to think I had no life, sitting there at my computer day after day playing games. But then I think back to my mother.
When I was 15, my mother became addicted to World of Warcraft. I mean a full blown, quit-her-job-to-play addiction. We've all heard the stories. There was the Everquest kid, and the kid who passed out playing WoW for over 9000 hours straight, and countless other horro stories. My mom was another one of the "fanatics", caught up the in Skinner box that is WoW. She set her alarm to wake her up for raids everyday, developed a romantic relationship with a fellow 'lock (warlock for all you non WoW-playing heathens), and even went so far as to accuse me of being jealous of her happiness playing WoW. She didn't shower or brush her teeth and would eat whatever was easy to grab from the fridge (quite often bricks of cheese). It was a downward spiral she never fully recovered from and it's a serious issue plaguing many today. The addiction part, not the hygiene thing.
Gaming and it's technological advances have sucked in millions of people, prying them away from the best game there is, Life. Life has anywhere from 0 to infinite frames per second, or for you math buffs, [0, ∞), all thanks to relativity. The resolution of life is fantastic (unless you wear glasses like myself) and you never get booted from the server. Respawn time is a bitch though, usually somewhere around 9 months, if you're a believer of reincarnation. Not only does life stimulate our sense of sight and hearing, but smell, taste, and touch as well. Those hot chicks you drool over but can't touch on the internet? Still can't touch them in real life, but boy, do they look good in full 3D. Call of Duty: Black Ops may be incredible, adrenaline rushing, fun, but it can't compare to a simple Nerf war with a couple friends.
As with just about everything in life, the internet and games are acceptable in moderation. But when it becomes our reality, that's when one must stand up and say, "Damn, I've spent too much on internet porn again." and drop one's credit card next to the bottle of lotion, sprint out the door and scream with joy (and agony as that giant burny thing in the sky fries one's retinas to a fine crisp). A happy medium between life and that incredible series of tubes in a box has to be found, lest you get sucked into a delusion supported by millions of other fellow e-reality goers. So, the next time you plop yourself down in front of ye olde craptop, consider a book instead, or a nice walk in that thing they call "outside". I swear, it won't bite. At least not much.
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