Welcome to the 6th floor.
Today’s contributors are: Ann, Sara, Tabitha, Frank, Billy and Scott.
Subject: Sara’s Soliloquy
Everyone’s sitting around eating dinner, spaghetti and meatballs, when Sara starts talking.
“I was thinking about the Internet today.”
“Mhmm Mrrhagrm?” Scott mumbles, spaghetti dangling from his mouth.
“It really changes as you get older. When you’re young, you go on and everything is exciting and new but you don’t really get a full sense of just how big it is. You almost expect to run into people you know everywhere. The percentages go up if you are on local sites, but it’s still very unlikely. Yet you still think you’re going to run into classmates or friends in random places on the web.”
Sara pauses for a bite of meatball.
“Then you get a little older. You’ve dabbled in the place a lot. You’ve found blogs, and irc channels, and chat rooms and youtube and digg and all those ‘popular’ sites. You’ve learned that while you aren’t likely to run into random people you know in real life on the web, the people you do run into can become friends easily. You become a little egotistical in that you think you know everything.”
Sara takes a sip of her wine.
“You start to assume that if you haven’t heard about something, it probably didn’t happen. Or that it just isn’t important. You’ve added silly Internet catch phrases like ‘all your base are belong to us’ and ‘fail’ to your vocabulary, yet disdain others like Anime style smilies or l8r; dismissing the latter as AOL speak.”
Sara takes another sip of wine.
Tabitha glances at the empty wine bottle in the kitchen. “How much wine have you had already Sara?”
“I’m not done! Shh.”
“As time goes on and you’re still discovering new things, you start to realize just how vast the world, and the Internet, are. You learn just because a site doesn’t come up on digg or slashdot or your favorite portal site doesn’t mean that it’s not cool, or that it hasn’t been around and successful. You learn how easy it is for a new site or idea to come into being, take off, and suddenly be all the rave. You discover things that you never realized were there and scratch your head thinking ‘How did I not know about this?’ You become a web disciple, fully believing that if there is information to be had, you can find it on the web somewhere. You probably blog recreationally and contribute to Wikipedia by this point.”
Sara takes a sip of wine, and picks up her fork and spoon and begins eating again.
“Next week on ‘Life According to Sara’…”
Tags: internet, life according to sara, rant, Sara, spaghetti and meatballs, web