Close To Far Away But Far Away From Close Neighbours

A click or two, and voila. You've travelled to the far end of the world. You can see it all, and make all those dreams of yours come true, dreams you never pictured yourself being in. At least, that is, in the virtual universe – the virtual world. That's where you can hop from continent to continent in the blink of an eye, talk to people from every corner of the country and all other countries too for that matter; that is where the action is.

And we're never shy on the Internet. Once the stranger at the bus stop you'd never even small talk about the weather with has been turned into a bunch of pixels on a screen, he's become someone you can whip out all of your inner beliefs to.

Strange, isn't it?

We want to be seen, be confirmed, be loved, so desperately that we'd rather spend a few hours comfortably in our ergonomic chairs, hammering keys and fumbling with webcams, than take a few steps outside of our own doors and possibly run into some so-called actual physical interaction. Maybe we're all doing it because of something as basic as survival instinct. Maybe that's the key. After all, if anything goes out of hand while scavenging the net, all the effort it takes from is one little click, the little red cross in the upper right corner. And if that doesn't work, try the virus programme... or the power button.

In real life there aren't any power buttons. No where to click when you want out.

No programme to run to find and rid your harddrives from anything unpleasant infecting your daily life.

Is it really that strange that we seek our comfort in two-dimensional words, in three-dimensional videos struggling to imitate reality, putting soundtracks to our lives that will give you that ”right” feel? Maybe the only strange thing about it is that we flee the horrors of reality, the physical world, only into a world that's trying it's best to be a replica of just the same. An imitation, a mirror image, a newer, upgraded version, all bugs reported and fixed.

The Internet isn't gonna give us our utopia, or our haven, simply cause in the end of the day, we still have to crashland back into our dim lit apartments among our rainy streets. We keep searching for somewhere to stimulate the mind while our bodies are still strapped into the passenger's seat, no eject button, no emergency exit anywhere in sight. Life itself takes us for the ride, but we're all too distracted by the shallowness of our parallell aliases to watch the view. Instead we clasp our seats as tightly as we can, too afraid to fall out to ever enjoy the rollercoaster.

It's our survival instinct.

But is it all about Darwin? Are we nothing but primitive stone age people walking around with laptops and cellphones instead of sticks and rocks? Or is there in fact something else underneath, something deeper? The question can be asked a hundred times but doesn't bring us any closer to the truth, to the answer. We want to view ourselves in a better light than we sometimes deserve. We're not here to ponder, to think, cause who knows where that would take us? No, thinking is something we should avoid, and in time, we've become pretty damn good at it too. Diverting ourselves from anything that's difficult by engulfing our beings in the threads of the silky spider's web, yes, that's become our habit.

And why not? Who says we gotta live in the future? Or that we gotta unplug our Ipods every time we pass a neighbour just to exchange a meaningless ”hello” when taking out the trash?

This is us, this is what makes us different from the older generations. We're the Internet generation and we're proud of it. Give us your sugar bowl for us to fill and you'll find us locking our doors. Give us your hand to say hello and you'll find us already turning our backs.

We're the Internet interaction generation and it's all we know of.

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This is an essay I just wrote for English writing class. I'm putting it up to illustrate just how stupid assignments we sometimes get. Write a 750 ord "practise essay" on how Internet has had its impact on society, ha! Ask a frenetic blogger about that and this is what you bloody get. Just gonna take out the contractions and then I'll pass with flyin' fuckin' colours. Cause they've stopped lookin' at formal stuff by now. They just wanna see if we got somethin' to say. And I do.
I always do, dammit.
So gimme another "practise essay", can't get enough of 'em. Hand me another one down the line. Cause of course I'm too stupid to just get the idea that you don't write blog posts the way you write somethin' like an academic essay.
C'mon!
We're already writing the C essay, why the fuck do we need "practise essays" to hand in as well? Just gives us shit to do and it don't lead to nothin'.
I'm sendin' it in now anyhow.
And I'll pass with fuckin' flyin' colours.