The web’s great, isnt it? A portal into the world’s consciousness, an instant ticket to lofty google rankings and an enraptured global audience… Those broadband tendrils spanning the world’s surface can bring the mention of your name to millions in a single mouse-click. Wouldn’t you like to be famous? Come on, you would, wouldn’t you?
Here’s what happened to me.
“I like your emails,” a friend told me a while back. “You know, the ones filled with your pain and suffering and loneliness and stuff. It’s good fun to read. You should try posting some of this stuff on the internet.”
“How do you mean?”
“Blogging,” he said.
“I’m not cool enough to go on the internet,” I said. “I’ve seen Myspace. It’s full of American teenagers who are all cooler than me. They all have girlfriends and take drugs and stuff.”
“You can too,” he said.
“What, get a girlfriend?”
“No," he said, "go on the internet. You just need to go on some of the boring sites, the ones for serious people with no social life.”
‘Oh… okay.”
So I try posting a blog. I email my friends about it. Then I sit back, relax and wait for those millions of people to stumble on my site with colossal advertising budgets trailing in their wake.
Nothing happens.
“What if nobody is interested?” I ask my friend. “I mean, perhaps nobody, you know, basically… cares.”
“That’s not true,” he says. “There’s a whole web community out there in the blogosphere, who discuss the issues of the day like a thriving, twenty-first century global society.’
“Oh,” I say. “Great.”
I wait for the thriving, twenty-first century global society to show up. I like the idea of a twenty thriving, twenty-first century global society.
I’d just like them to visit my fucking site once in a while.
I go back to my blog and look how it’s doing.
“0 comments,” it announces chirpily. “Views – 1.”
That’s the thing about the web. Most attempts to communicate with the world produce audience levels that would fill a failed standup comic washing the dishes in a strip-club with a sense of comparative pride. Global communication? Most of the time it feels like talking to half a room of disinterested people in the back room of a community centre while workmen drill up the road outside.
“Perhaps I should pretend to be an overgrown immature sex obsessive,” I ponder to the friend. “Then I could write a sex blog. That girl with the book got very successful doing that.”
“You are an overgrown immature sex obsessive,” he says.
“Yes,” I say. “But I never have any sex.”
“That wouldn’t make a very interesting blog,” he says.
“No,” I say. “That’s true.”
“Go and have another look at your blog,” he says. “Maybe some more people have visited it.”
I look back at my blog. Six views. All people I know.
There’s one comment.
“Aha! I wonder who the mystery viewer is?” I think, moving the mouse. “How exciting!”
With trembling fingers, I click on the comment.
‘Hi, Dale,’ it says. ‘It’s Nikki from Falkland Road. Can you re-address your Time Out subscription, cos it keeps coming here. Lol.’
“Maybe I should try doing a video instead,” I think. “After all, that’s fast becoming the most effective, direct and personal way to reach a mass audience. Videos are the biggest saviour of free speech on the planet in these times of multimedia and political angst.” So I log into Youtube.
The most watched video of the day is called ‘Farting in public’.
Spencer, a Californian teenager, is in a library.
“So we’ve got spencer back there with his sound effects,” the commentary tells me. “Spencer, let’s hear a rip."
Spencer rips loudly. I feel a terrible sense of depression slowly descend on me.
“One more,” the guy spurs the young star on. “That’s awesome!”
As youthful farts fill the soundtrack I scroll down the page. Number of times viewed: 1,348,834.
“I’m fucked,” I gasp.
So this is it - twenty-first century networked society. All wit and sensitivity has been washed away and replaced by a huge televised arse farting into a planet-sized camera. This isnt dumbing down, this is a full frontal lobotomy performed in front of your eyes, to the backing of a Linkin Park track. If humanity carries on at this rate the entire race will be reduced to six billion hairless monkeys giggling and shitting the remains of their brains into a muddy hole by the year 2009.
I think I hear the sound of the future.
