Well it’s true. Or is it? … What?
Well, I tend to rant a lot about the internet and how amazing it is and how great it is that everyone can have a voice yadda yadda yadda blah blah blah. Etc. Sometimes though I wonder if it really is a good thing.
For instance, the other day I was really bored and I ran a search on Google for “who likes taco salad.” In quotes, because naturally I only wanted exact matches. And much to my bewilderment, it turned up a hit. Incidentally, the page it turned up was a message board for Atkins dieters, some thread about how to eat breakfast while still adhering to the diet (“This morning I had some leftover lard dumplings and a jar of mayonnaise”). I mean, I’ve read about the science behind it, and I grant you that it makes a certain degree of sense. But I still believe that it can be taken too far. Way, way too far. Like, lard dumplings far.
In any case, you have to admit that it’s pretty crazy that we live in an age where i can find out something as ridiculously insignificant as “who likes taco salad” with a simple Google query. What it has brought me to realize is that every second that the internet is in existence, we come nearer and nearer to recreating that once hypothetical “monkeys on typewriters” representation of infinity. Except we’re not just recreating all the great literary works (in fact, those probably already exist online somewhere), but we’re recreating every insipid string of random words that could conceivably be strung together in any semi-sensical fashion. In fact, it likely goes down to letter level as well. I bet you’d be hard pressed to find a 4-letter string that doesn’t exist on the web in some page of computer-generated bargle or other. I haven’t checked recently, but we might be running short on 5-letter strings too. And that number will only continue to increase.
Anyway, I survived my first day of classes, and I even lived through president Bush’s State of the Union address without muting it too many times. Just once I want to hear one of those speeches start with, “The state of our nation is weak. Very very weak. And feeble.” That would be great.
So what lessons did we learn today? Freedom of expression is nice but also kinda depressing. Also, I am tired and I am going to bed. So remember these things when someday you don’t know how you are going to finish a sentence and so you just ramble on for a while until eventually the sentence comes to a natural conclusion.
