TheBoySaunders.com

I love the Internet (or should that be ‘I <3 da Interwebz, lol‘). Life has become infinitely better since it first exploded from the cerebral cortex of Tim Berners-Lee. Remember when we had to use libraries and stuff to look up obscure facts? Computer gaming was a solitary affair? Long distance phone calls were bounced off satellites and had a 10-second delay? People hand-wrote each other letters? Cinema listings were obtained by ringing the cinema, or leafing through the newspaper? Christ… remember printed newspapers?! I’d argue that the Internet is the greatest innovation of all time (yeah, the wheel was nice, and penicillin has its applications, but neither of these allow me to stream new South Park episodes from the comfort of my front room).

And it’s getting  better all the time. Remember trying to download music files from Napster at the turn of the last century? An hour and twenty minutes on a 56k dial-up modem and then someone terminates the connection 97% of the way through ‘Just a Girl’ by No Doubt just to be malicious. Crap song, not sure why I bothered, but that experience cut me deep. The other night I downloaded ‘Kids’ by MGMT in four seconds flat. Magnificent.

There’s a downside here too, of course. The Interweb has given a forum to idiots who like to whinge. And, man, don’t they just suck the fun out of everything?

In the past, these people simply would not have had their opinions heard. They’d have skulked in their dingy back rooms, occasionally writing outraged letters to magazine and newspaper editors airing their warped and retarded views, the recipients of which would bin their ramblings within seconds. Now, the very same people sit in the very same room but get to spew their bile and vitriol on every website that invites them to ‘Have YOUR say’.

(And, incidentally, people who capitalise the word YOUR (as in ‘this is YOUR chance to vote, for I have granted this to you in my benevolence’) should be f**king killed. Right now.)

I am aware, of course, about the hypocrisy of posting about idiots whinging on the Internet. The incomparable David Mitchell summed it up best in this Guardian article:

Most people don’t comment much online. They’re not arrogant enough to think their opinions, or anger, are of general interest. But the convention of inviting comment from the benign many has put a metaphorical speakers’ corner at the bottom of every web page for the poisonous few.

The sPeak You’re bRanes blog collects the more ridiculous examples of this phenomena from the BBC’s Have Your Say website under such handy headers as ‘Werthers Original Imperialists’, ‘Self Appointed Sages’ and ‘Grief Athletes’ and is always on my daily list of blogs to visit. However, the main problem that effects me is so called ‘Geek Rage‘.

‘Geek Rage’ is the phenomenon where sweaty, obsessive (usually) men drive themselves into an apoplexy of anger over some triviality. Unfortunately, being as I am an entry-level geek, my enjoyment of certain pass-times have been trivialised by the twin forces of internet negativity and geek rage. A recent example of geek rage (and I only choose this because it’s the first to come to mind - there have been many examples) was Blizzard’s recent decision to lower the level and cost requirements for mounts in World of Warcraft. A perfectly reasonable change, I would argue, making the levelling process both easier and quicker and bypassing a lot of content that would otherwise need to be laboriously slogged through.

Not so, according to the official forums. The change was a ’slap in the face’, Blizzard are ’stupid’, people threw strops announcing they were quitting the game… this is the very definition of geek rage and it makes me sad.

In a way, geek rage has ruined wrestling for me. The websites I frequent have long, angry articles about why the television writers are stupid, the wrong performers are getting screen time, why everything is ‘fail’. If you read enough about why something is rubbish, you start to believe it.

I recently had the privilege of sitting through the first five seasons of Lost on DVD box set. Religiously, I avoided internet spoilers and happily came out the other side firmly believeing that this was some of the best television ever made. Once this was done, I hit the forums… and whaddyaknow? The writers had lost the plot, such and such a character was awful, sharks had been jumped and the failure was epic.  I still want to see season six, but chances are it’ll be crap.

You see how easily it happens?

The Internet has potential for tremendous good, but it can also rob me of my interest in geeky pursuits. So just stop it, OK? There’s always Reasons to be Cheerful.