EVERYONE STOP TALKING ABOUT THE INTERNET

This is the future of communication.

I’ve been working at a Chicago comic book store for the last five years which has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life, getting to hang out with mostly-interesting people talking about nerd shit 24/7 and serving a mostly-cool clientele that constantly reminds me one thing: In the real world, no one cares how smart you try to be. Intelligence is a valuable commodity in that everyone wants to have it, but when you’re talking to regular-ass people, no one cares about the art installment or the foreign film you’ve just seen unless you can talk about it, not the act of experiencing it. Whenever a slew of posts of unwarranted narcissism clog up my feed (#firstworldproblems), I can get a respite from this at my comic store and realize that no one cares about the Internet. So why should you?

Well, it’s important to be in the know. It’s important to know what a Tumblarity is, or why Twitter is revolutionizing the means of communication (even though most people just use it to follow Shaq), or why Sasha Grey matters. The more you know about things, in that the more you know these things exist, the smarter you will appear to be. I’ve decided to prepare a guide for the Internet-challenged to follow along, so that the next time my mom’s friend calls me on the phone to tell me I should start social networking myself (this actually happened) I can point him this way and spare him the awkwardness of knowing that I am far ahead of him.

Twitter

What’s Twitter? Twitter is where you condense your personality into 140 characters and share it with dozens of people you vaguely know in real life, thousands you don’t know at all and maybe four or five people you might actually call a good friend. While blogs are about self-indulgence through the overuse of language, Twitter lets you disseminate whatever half-cooked thoughts you have to dozens of people who probably just don’t care. It’s about telling people about the stuff you care about in the least meaningful way you can – just telling them. I just read this article! Check it out. I just ate this sandwich! Buy it. You’re not giving anything personal about yourself, but you’re alerting the world to the signifiers you choose to identify yourself with  – I read this magazine. I eat this sandwich. I watch this movie. In the year 2009, these things are important and so am I. It can be interesting to get inside the head of a public figure–you know, if knowing Demi Moore’s inner thoughts is super important to you–but for your friends, it just replaces the conversations you could be having.

We hear a lot (those of us unfortunate to be college students or recent graduates) about how the Internet is making us less personal, that everyone is using this artificial reality (Twitter, AIM, Facebook, Friendster, Hipster Runoff) to sidestep the conventions of actual reality (having conversations, laughing in real life, giving hugs). This is sort of true, but that ignores the purpose of the Internet: to communicate. And how do you make the act of communication a worthwhile one? Well, communicate something you think is important – not a hyperlink, but your real thoughts, not something you did that day but how you felt as you did it, and so forth. The Internet suffers from people oversharing meaningless ideas (Tumblr, Julia Allison’s blog, this website i’ve already countermanded your burn so don’t even try) just as much as it suffers from people under-sharing important ones (Twitter, durrrrrf). So get on the Internet and start actually communicating, you dummy!

Tumblarity

I have no idea why you would care about Tumblarity, which is Tumblr’s new set of metrics to show how much time you waste. If you have a use for it, that’s great – everything you need or thought you needed to know is wrapped up into a vaguely important set of numbers (I am, for example, ranked somewhere in the teens of thousands in popularity among the Chicago area, which is so insignificant I can’t even come up with a suitable sarcastic analogy). If you don’t have a use for it, then don’t use it, or at the very least try to think about why you don’t like it and what Tumblr could do to get better (not that this is immensely important either, but it’s better than just grousing). All too often, when an Internet giant makes a change to its layout or interface, like Facebook’s visual overhauls (2007 or 2009 or 2010–pick!) or Jezebel’s moderation of its comments, people are super quick to ta-ta and no-no the change as if the quicker they can be sarcastic the more valid their opinion will be, the more entrenched in truth their smugness will be. The worst thing I can think about Tumblarity is that it got people to start caring about a made-up word.

Hipster Runoff

I think the revelation that Carles is just some dude working an unimpressive job is the best thing I could have hoped for, because it means that HRO isn’t an ironic in-joke but a more depressing extended riff on this gaudy faux-intellectual culture: Not the fashion trends, or the fluffing of unremarkable bands, but the insistence that their tunnel vision of ideas and pursuits are the only things worth doing, like why care about Africa if there’s a house party on the West Side this weekend? Why read a new book if I can mainline until I can’t see anymore? Why get stressed about public education reform if I can take photos of myself and Photoshop them all over? HRO doesn’t just lambast the absurdity of excessive entitled party culture, but the mundanity of hipster routine – that like any subculture that gets some kind of mainstream recognition, the copycats have come in to regurgitate all the old tricks and the original kids are left to gripe about how they did it before it was cool while not doing anything new.

Sasha Grey

Sasha Grey is a porn star who watches Werner Herzog and loves to be pooped on, apparently. I find this immensely appealing, because in my attempt to legitimize pornography as “the new feminism” or “empowering” I have forgotten about the subliminal rape culture it endorses and welcome any attempt to justify my addiction to fetish porn as I find it harder to find my non-existent girlfriend attractive with each passing moment. But Grey is interesting not because she’s a porn star with intelligence, but because she’s an intelligent person who just happens to be a porn star (suck on that parallelism!). The more articles I read that marvel at how this porn star is doing it for herself, dropping facts about the French New Wave as a young stud drops a deuce on her face, the more I wonder whether or not Grey is just acting some depraved fantasy for sad young literary men and women everywhere who want to fuck and talk about Kerouac but are too afraid to appear smart and sexual at the same time. For straddling the line, I think Grey is interesting, but unfortunately I think most of the people who talk about her are just afraid.

Animal Collective

Look, I’m not one of the cool kids – I only started listening to AnCo after hearing “My Girls” even after being aware of them for years. You’re not a shittier person if you only start listening to a band after they get popular – you’re shittier if you start pretending to like them after this happens. You can’t listen to everything, man – just take what you can and figure out what you like. Of course, I could just be justifying my own laziness for not giving them a try years ago, or for ignoring their output after hearing some clicky-clacky animal sound bullshit when I was in high school and scoffing as I went back to the comfort of my boring post-Highway Dylan records. Stop judging, you turkeys!

Blogs: Are they self-indulgent?

Yes, which is why I just wrote 1400 words on things I decried as meaningless in the opening sentences of this post. Life is only worth it half the time.