The Whitworthian

Issue date: 4/8/08 Last Updated: 4/7/08

NOTE: This article contains a correction.

In the late 1970s, a group of military leaders, statesmen and scientists discuss matters of grave importance in an underground bunker.

"Give us the skinny on this groovy 'Internet' contraption you've dreamed up," the requisite cigar-chomping general says.

A bookish scientist shuffles across the orange shag carpet, and leans back against the wood-paneled wall.

"Woah, chill man." The scientist adjusts his science-glasses. "The cats at the Advanced Research Projects Agency are cookin' up some pretty slick electrical voodoo. It'll revolutionize communications, allowing man to commune - to harmonize - with fellow man."

"Just communications? Honestly, I don't think you realize what you have here," a politician says. "Think of the military application! Gentlemen, I see a world filled to the brim with dancing hamsters! Kittens emblazoned with misspelled captions! Whole new genres of nudity!"

The politician rises to his feet, gesticulating wildly. "I see a land where free iPods are but a monkey shock away! Where drunk party pictures never die! Where weirdos can find entire weirdo-based communities full of weirdos just as weirdo as them. A place where bizarre one-note jokes are endlessly repeated and driven into the ground, until they are reported by serious media outlets, or Mike Huckabee, six years later. Where people can join hands, lift their voices into the air and proclaim, 'All your base are belong to us,' and mean it. We stand on the precipice of a brave new frontier, gentlemen. All we have to do is leap."

"But surely, nobody has a mind genius enough to take the initiative to bring about such a marvelous utopia!" the scientist said.

"I will," the politician replied. "Or my name isn't… Al Gore."

And now we have it. The Internet embodies all that is good and noble about America, democracy and human nature - and all that is horrible and laughable.

One the positive side, the Internet contains sites like the glorious Wikipedia, may it reign forever.

Let's say you want to know the intimate details, the full scope of the convoluted twists and turns, of the Digimon saga. Wikipedia is at your rescue.

Take a laptop into any classroom, and you're automatically a Wikipedia search away from being smarter than any professor.

Especially if the topic is Digimon.

(Some complain that Wikipedia is inaccurate. Well, have they ever considered that maybe it is the truth that is inaccurate?)

But the Internet has a dark side as well. I speak, of course, of a disgusting Web site called "Wikipedia."

Think of the worst group project team you've ever been on.

That is Wikipedia, but instead of just two of the type of team member that spends hours arguing how to align the page numbers, you have literally thousands: Every one of them locked in a frenzied epic battle over, say, whether the "Snuffleupagus" article should be merged with the "Mythical Pachyderms" article.

And you know the group member who never contributes except for changing all mentions of "David Hume" in your PowerPoint to "Reverend PoopyBrain"? Wikipedia is also chock-full of those.

In the end, you read sentences like this: Thomas Jefferson, a man[citation needed], was responsible for the Louisiana purchase. [Trivia is discouraged under Wikipedia's style guidelines.]

Also, he was a fartburger. [citation needed.]

This is followed by a lengthy section about the time that Thomas Jefferson was referenced on "Family Guy."

Part of the problem is that the Internet is largely used, run and operated by people. It used to be the Internet was used only by nerds, as a brave frontier to try out new and daring Star Wars jokes. (Whattya get when you cross Chewbacca with the worst comedienne of all time? Wookie Goldberg.)

Then came the prepubescent teenage girls, rampaging through the pages of the Internet like the Mongol horde. But instead of using fire and spears to do their pillaging, the prepubescent teenage girls use winking emoticons and 18-point pink Comic Sans text.

They also started the horrible Internet fad of abbreviating everything so they have more room for ellipses… and exclamation points!!!

Consider this disturbing instant message transcript between 15-year-old Kady Huntington and her sister, age 13.

Our top Whitworthian cryptologists have decoded their mysterious language, and will place the translation in parentheses:

Kady345: hey sis im trying to deside which movie I should go 2 … or maybe tv show 2 buy @ bbs. (Greetings, mi hermana. I'm quite the cinemaphile, but can't decide precisely what to see on the silver screen or purchase at my local Blockbuster Store.)

Hannahmontanachic13: G2G! (Go to "Goonies") BTW (Buy "The Warriors"!) LOL! (Land Of the Lost)" TMI! (Take "Mission Impossible") TooFtooF! ("2 Fast 2 Furious")

Yet, just when the Internet began to acclimate to the inarticulate glitter-covered presence of prepubescent girls, another, more ancient, scourge arose. I speak of the elderly.

The elderly discovering the Internet (or as they call it, "The E-mailer") is like the elderly discovering Ghost Riding, only more destructive.

They are the grisly 16-car pileup on the Information Superhighway.

Oh, they don't mean to hurt anybody. They just lived in a simpler, kinder time, when, for only a nickel, you could buy a five-dollar bill and people sold their organs on the corner market instead of eBay.

To old people, the express purpose of e-mail is the speedy dissemination of heartwarming anecdotes, 3-megabyte pictures of their cats, the Footsteps poem, and the most toxic computer viruses known to man. If they receive an e-mail, whether from a "COMPLETELY REPUTABLE PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANY" or "such a nice young man" from Nigeria, their first instinct is to forward it to their entire address book.

And those are but few fractions of the roiling mass of humanity and inhumanity that is the Internet. There's YouTube, where grainy videos of an obese man dancing in a bikini to "Achy Breaky Heart" are invariably accompanied by comments that President Bush is personally responsible for 9-11 and ruining the Simpsons.

There's MySpace, which, by now, is populated only by predators pretending to be 16-year-old girls, and the occasional Chris Hansen.

There's Facebook, where millions of people join Facebook groups to complain about Facebook. And, perhaps most comically, there's CNN.com.

As Samuel Morse said after creating the telegraph: What hath God wrought?*

To find out, read God's blog at www.hampsterdance.com.

Daniel Walters is the opinions editor and a senior majoring in communications and history. Contact him at daniel.walters@whitworthian.com.

*In the original column, the quote "What hath God wrought?" was incorrectly attributed. Samuel Morse said this quote.

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