Thoughts on the Nature of the Internet

I wonder what the ratio of "content-to-crap" there is on the Internet. Think about all of the material that's ever been posted online, in the public realm of cyberspace. How much of it is actually useful to us? How much of it is just pointless blather?

We put so much of ourselves online these days, in Twitter, in Facebook/Myspace, and so on. This is certainly not a new thing; I can remember quite clearly the vanity websites of the Nineties, although such things have not permeated the mainstream culture the way today's modes have. Why do we put so much of ourselves online, when many of us have very little to say? (For the record, I consider myself guilty of this sin much of the time, though hopefully not all the time).

I'm going to go with pure narcissism as the fuel for about fifty percent of the Internet's content, at the very least. Seriously, stop and think about it for a moment. Think about everything that you've placed on the Internet, all of the content that you've created. Not content that you've consumed, not things you've perused or enjoyed, but things that you've actually inserted into the greater series of tubes that is the Intertron. How much of it are pictures of you or the people around you? How much of your written material is dialogue about your life, shared with your friends? Perhaps I should ask this question a different; of everything that you've ever put up online, public or private, for whatever reason, how much of it is not about you?

This is not to imply that such a perspective is wrong. The reality is that this thing we call the Internet is a tool for facilitating communication between people. It's not a repository for artistic endeavor, any more than my phone is meant to be. But it never fails to amuse me (and I'm just as guilty of this as any individual, as I said) that so much of our social cyber-construction is built to carve little niches of ourselves, to put as much or as little of ourselves out there in the digital world.

If you think about it, we're all vying for a little quasi-immortality (a phrase, incidentally, that amuses as much as "most unique"). Long after you've moved on, there are relics of your history floating around on the Internet, buried just below the surface, waiting to be unearthed with a little digging. These bits of data, these pieces left in the wake of your interest long after you've moved on will remain forever, as long as there exists a server to hold them. And it's always interesting to see how your little relics and artifacts can reappear, sometimes when you don't even expect it (and sometimes that's not a good thing).