Nice rant by Philip Dawdy.

This whole Web 2.0, social networking, virtual community business is essentially a pornography of the self—a projected, fictionalized self that is then worshipped by the slightly less-perfect self. Human existence has been this way to a degree once we became the leisure society (am I dabbling in Veblen here? I think so.), but with the Web 2.0 we are so much more willing to spread our selves and our self-infatuations around. If you don’t believe me, cruise through MySpace—a house of mirrors if there ever was one—where we are all rock stars, hotties, vampires and gangstas with flava.

This state of affairs cannot be especially healthy for our souls, our psychology and, hell, our brains because none of it is real. But it sure is a successful approach to getting us to spend more time on the computer (oh, how I miss being able to write on a computer pre-Net, you have no idea). That’s not good either. Because the way the Net is now with all of its “communities” and communes of information there are simply too many stimuli. And, I’ve seen so many instances of such stimuli winding people up in ways that result in human wreckage.

The computer, some of you may recall, was supposed to free us. We were supposed to have so many automated tasks and so on that we’d be done with work by 3 p.m. and off to the social club. Things haven’t worked out this way at all. Not only do we do more work for more hours than we used to before the computer age, but even when we are not working per se, we have become slaves to our fictional selves on Web 2.0. I worry about people younger than me who have no idea what human communication and hanging out were like before the PCs and Macs turned into these hyper-communication tools. The Net has become our social club. In Seattle, any popular coffeehouse is filled with people who just sit at tables on their laptops and communicate with other fictional selves on the Net instead of doing the least bit of the communication and interaction—positive or negative—with people sitting five feet away. All those people, all that weird isolation. Zombies.

Thanks to Bill Thompson for this:

Smash Hits closed down this year. It was probably past saving but still sad. Is there room for a pop magazine to launch in 2007? Let’s do a little roleplay.

Publisher: Hey kids! Here’s a new magazine.
Kids: What’s a magazine?
Publisher: Well, it’s like a book…
Kids: Oh piss off.
Publisher: No wait! It’s in full colour, and you can read it on the bus on the way to school…
Kids: We read our text messages on the way to school.
Publisher: Okay – well we’ve mocked up a magazine to show you. Take a look at THIS!
Kids: Where are the videos?
Publisher: What?
Kids: Where’s the button to press play on the videos?
Publisher: Well, no, you see these are just photographs…
Kids: We’ve already downloaded all these photographs from the internet. How do we use this to talk to each other?
Publisher: Well, there’s a letters page…
Kids: How do we know when our friends are reading the same magazine?
Publisher: Well, you don’t…
Kids: Hang on, this still says that Ray might win X Factor…
Publisher: Well, you see we had to write this last week because it takes a long time to print onto paper…
Kids: But shouldn’t that have changed to say Leona by now?
Publisher: You can’t change it – it’s printed on paper!
Kids: So it doesn’t update?
Publisher: Well, no, but… Well anyway. How much would you pay for this magazine, do you think?
Kids: Pay? You have got to be ****ing joking.