DON’T BOGART THAT NET MY FRIEND

I have a confession to make: I’ve become an Internet junkie and don’t think I’m alone.

Sometimes you feel like you’re chasing a rabbit down a hole. You plunk down in your seat merely to find out what the weather will be today or how your favorite team fared last night and the next thing you know, you’re branching into all kinds of uncharted Wickepedia territory that you never had an interest in before. After filling your head with a dazzling display of visual imagery and terse text, you look around and another hour has clicked off the clock. It’s downright addictive. 

We’ve all heard about carpel-tunnel syndrome for people who spend endless hours at their jobs in front of a computer terminal. Your wrists get funky. Your fingers wear down to the nubs. It’s easy to foresee a day when most of Americans will suffer from it because of the allure of the Internet.

Wait ‘til they install that last mile technology and/or increase broadband tenfold so that all those still photos become animated and then look out. That information highway will become a million lanes wide, all screeching to a halt in front of your eyeballs. Let’s just jump to the next level and get those computer chips planted in our heads now. Don’t know about you but I’d love to know how to play the piano without all those boring years of practice.

There will be fistfights in every family foyer over who gets to sit in front of the terminal and for how long. The TV networks don’t stand a chance when our choices become infinite. Don’t know if you’ve been channel surfing lately in cable TV land but they mostly feel like one long commercial occasionally interrupted by original programming. The holy trinity, Corporate America, Madison Avenue and Silicon Valley, are taking us apart piece by piece and then putting us back together again the way they want us to be – placid, functioning zombies, programmed to buy, buy, buy! Once we, the guinea pig generation, have been figured out, the rest of the world will get permanently hooked up and it’ll be all over but the consuming.

We’re on the cusp of the next phase of our total absorption and capitulation. It is called VOD (Video on Demand) where we will all get to watch what we want, whenever we want, wherever we are on the delivery platform of our choosing as long as our credit cards hold up. When combined with an infinite number of Internet streaming sources, why would anyone go back to the tube? TV will become what the Model T Ford was to today’s Formula One racecars.

We are heading towards a tailor-made world of our own creation. Make no mistake about it, the advertisers are zeroing in on your brain, figuring out what makes us tick. Using the database of encrypted pages that we are all filling out as we qualify for this contest or that free giveaway, they are knocking us down and tagging us like they’re on some big media safari. You’ll be sitting at your terminal downstairs getting bombarded with new car commercials and better equity home loan rates, while little Jimmy upstairs will be watching the same program getting hit with Dockers jeans commercials and discount coupons for the local amusement park.

It’s creeping up on us incrementally. Think about those children in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution who were hooked up to clunky machines in noisy environments, spending endless hours of toil and trouble becoming human automatons. We’ve all seen their hollowed expressions and forlorn looks as they stared into the cameras for all eternity to see. If your spouse were to snap your picture the next time you were sitting in front of the computer screen, you would see the same vacant stare, the dullness behind the eyes of a person hooked up to our modern day opium den - The NET.

We are those children of yesteryear but we have a brand new master. Pull your head out of the LCD screen and smell the roses. There is a technological revolution taking place that is conquering our hearts, minds and pocketbooks one gigabyte at a time. It’s well underway, nobody seems to care and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. Here in LaLa land, we’re the experts at creating fodder to hang out during the entertainment breaks between the commercial islands. When the computers are programmed with reasoning and discreet logic, it’s all over.

Reminds me of a story I heard about a big time TV writer/producer. Somebody pitched him an idea about a kidnapping and he said, “Wait right there.” He turned to his computer, typed in the word “kidnapping” and said, “Let’s go to lunch. The script should be ready by the time we get back.” He had apparently programmed every show he was ever responsible for into a database and the computer was able to sift through it all, combine it with the principal characters of his new show and put it back together. Oh, some story editor probably had to clean up subplot B and C and come up with some witty dialogue but it’s scary just to contemplate – especially if you happen to be a writer. The media has always been at the forefront in shaping the future by interpreting the present. We have abdicated almost all original thought to the people writing the programming. The Internet is going to become more pervasive than we can even imagine. World domination is the goal. Can cyber-cannibalism be far off?

One thing the media has always done well is clone itself. A successful TV show spawns four others before the first rerun hits the air. Most of them fail. No real explanation for the big hit other than right time, right place and pure luck. Formulas are divined and we, the lazy audience, fall into familiar viewing patterns. Advertisers count on us to show up in droves for this show and not that show. The electronic Internet database they are building for each one of us is their ticket to the future. We are data. What we think, eat and talk about in chat rooms is more data. That data is deemed to be invaluable to the would-be sponsors of the world.

Sometimes I will be mainlining on the information highway and look up to discover my better half hovering in the doorway. Try as hard as I might to ignore her, I’ll glance up and she’s shooting me daggers. There is that silent communication that says, “Get up. Get out. Get your own damn breakfast! I need to check something out right now and you’re in the way.”  It’s nothing personal. She just needs her fix.