This is a rant about the internet.
So I, like most people, mostly enjoy the internet. Obviously, I have an internet presence. The internet, thanks to this blog, knows all about my period and that time I wiped my ass with my left hand in a small little bathroom in Lima. One day, I swear, I am going to go to a job interview and they are going to tell me that I was never actually considered for the position but they wanted to see the face of the idiot who consistently shares stories about her own stupidity, as if anyone even fucking cares anyway. Yup, they are going to laugh me out of the office and give me a roll of toilet paper as a sort of going away present. This has gotten entirely off track.
The internet. So this is sort of how I feel about the internet. Okay, so, I really like to go grocery shopping. I find grocery stores to be highly organized, which I enjoy. I also like to think about the hierarchy of product placement and about how the ways that companies get stores to place their food directly impacts the buying habits of American shoppers. It’s cool to think about but also sort of depressing because it’s like, goddamnit we are so susceptible to bullshit. Anyway, the grocery store has long been one of my favorite places to go. Don’t believe me? Ask my mom. She’ll tell you. And you would think that, since I love grocery stores and because I am an American, that the bigger the grocery store the better! You would be wrong. When I come upon an extra large grocery store I am initially really excited about it. All the aisles, the products, the people watching, the unnecessary diversity of cereals and ice creams. But I find those really big grocery stores to be incredibly overwhelming. It’s like, I walk in, stroll through a few aisles, then experience sensory overload, forget what I needed to buy (even if I have thought in advance and made a list!) and flee through the automatic doors. It’s just too much. That is sort of how I feel about the internet. I have my few pages that I frequent, and then I’m like,
God, the internet is so boring. There is nothing to do here!
so I try and find some new places and all of a sudden I have like 25 tabs open concerning all these things that I didn’t know existed that all of a sudden I just have to know about. And inevitably some percentage of those things are evil. Like, I was reading about this woman who faked her own pregnancy and somehow ended up on the webpage of one of those people who thinks homosexuality can be cured through prayer. I would have left the room screaming if I wasn’t in my own damn bedroom and the only place to go in my current outfit was the kitchen from where I would have to eventually return. I closed the tab. It’s like, the internet is a long hallway with all these doors and you literally never know what is going to be behind the door when you open it. It might be a really pleasant looking door, with pictures of Dan Rydell on the front, but then you open it and BAM it’s like Rush Limbaugh’s fan group’s headquarters. Or something. But the thing about the internet is that for as much as you don’t know about it, it knows everything about you. Or so it thinks.
This is actually what I set out to write about before I went all crazy with grocery store analogies and Rush Limbaugh fan groups.
Okay, so, the internet tracks the things that you do on so that it can plaster whatever page you are visiting with an ad about Made Well jeans because sometimes, when you are feeling a little sad and like your wardrobe sucks, you peruse the Made Well webpage and look at clothing you can’t afford. Which, as you can imagine, only makes you feel sadder and more like your wardrobe sucks. But then it’s like, you can’t even choose when you want to do that because it is everywhere. Want to research the Genocide Convention for an article you are writing? Made Well jeans. Want to look up the Quechuan word for avocado (it’s palta, FYI)? Made Well jeans. Want to watch the highest scoring beam routine at the Jesolo gymnastics meet? You guessed it, Made Well jeans. You get the picture. So meanwhile, as you are being absolutely inundated with advertisements for luxury clothing items, Twitter can’t seem to come up with hashtags that actually relate to things you would be interested in reading about. It has this trending thing, whereby it theoretically takes information about the people you are following combined with your location and then suggests a whole bunch of hashtags that might be of interest to you. So, I follow a whole bunch of feminists and a few of my good friends (most of whom are feminists) and Twitter suggests #2YearsofBoyfriend which is a hashtag about Justin Bieber’s song that I have never even heard before (I had to look it up to see what the hell the hashtag even meant). It also suggested #GetWellJimKelly and #CrappySnacks. I just don’t know.
And then there is LinkedIn. Now this is really weird. So I used to work at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in midtown. The restaurant was located in the lobby of The London hotel. The hotel had this doorman named Collin who was really nice who I used to always talk to. Collin and I never interacted on the internet. I never put on my LinkedIn profile that I worked at Gordon Ramsay (I don’t think I even had a LinkedIn profile back then) and yet, the other day it suggested that I connect with Collin even though we had absolutely no shared connections! How did it know?! How can it connect me to some random doorman with whom I have had absolutely no electronic communication and yet elsewhere on the internet it thinks I give a damn about Justin Bieber?! I literally do not understand. I do not understand and I also find myself pretty damn terrified.
I just don’t know, you guys. The internet. It like knows everything and nothing at once. Sometimes I think maybe I should just like exit the internet and go live in a cave somewhere (or just my bedroom only this time with no online access). Then maybe I could go meet my friend out at a bar without this guy threatening to laugh in my face.
franklyrebekah 