The Internet is Dead

In case you haven't noticed by now, there is a non-communicable disease spreading through the entire world that most of us don't even recognize. No, it's not AIDS, and it's not any other kind of disease your doctor can cure. It's called banner blindness.

This phenomenon occurs when a person is so acclimated to the internet that they no longer notice banners advertising goods or services. They simply scroll past them, or jump over them while reading. You've seen these ads, and you know what I'm talking about. They pertain to nearly every subject on the internet, and nearly everyone of every age, but they, unlike the real viruses of today, are not mutating to counteract our resistance.

The most common conception of today's banner ads, text ads, and video ads, are that they are just in place for someone else to make money off of you. These ads claim to be there in order to aid our internet quest. You know, the quest where we were searching the internet, a free tool, in order to search for information in hopes that an ad would take us to a presumably better solution, providing of course that we empty out our pockets first. Other ads claim to be simple advertising, there to distract us from where we arrived on the internet, and pull us to their website, with promise of games or news or other sorts of fun that we would've never noticed before if we hadn't been so graciously called upon by advertisements.

This is what the internet has evolved itself around. The thinking of the majority of web developers is as such "Hey, this is a good keyword. If I hire someone to write some things about this keyword on my web page, and advertise, people will visit, click my ads, and I will make money." That's it. That is the bottom line for most web developers. They want you to click their ads, so they make money.

How do I know this? How can I make these assumptions? I am a web developer myself. I am not ashamed to admit that my seemingly entertaining or informative websites were not create to entertain you, or inform you. They were created in hopes that you would click on a little ad, and I would make a few cents. This is my goal. This is the goal of every other freelance web developer with a budget. This is the goal of bloggers. This is the goal of informative sites. This is the goal of internet arcades. This is the goal of everyone who is not a giant, and who can fuel their pocket books with advertisements that are paid before hand, like MySpace.

Only a handful in every hundred people, or if you're unlucky, thousand people, ever bother to click an ad. I don't know if they feel the ad is helpful. I don't know if they feel the ad is a nuisance. I don't know if they simply clicked on accident. All I know is that they clicked it, I made $0.05, and I am anxiously awaiting the next.

How is this such a problem? The internet is an icon. Anyone can be anyone on the internet, and the internet is made by anyone. Without people, the internet is useless, and there would be no constant expansion. That is what this post right now is doing, expanding the internet, adding information to it. That's what the internet was meant for, and that is good. However, in all honesty, most of the expansion is done to lure readers or users into clicking an ad. We web developers don't really care if you enjoy yourselves playing the games on our internet arcades. We are trying to make a quick buck. We don't really care if you learn something new about puppies, we hope you click our ad, and buy something for your new puppy, so that we get a couple dollars. The internet is being clogged, slowly but surely, with tons of useless information, copied, pasted, and summarized, just in order to show up on a search engine and get your visit and your click.

You might be asking yourself right now a few questions. First off, why would we do this to you? Why would we put up information we probably don't even fully understand, or did not write ourselves? It seems unethical, but then again, isn't charging $6 for a bag of popcorn at the movie theater unethical? That bag and popcorn seed costs about 5 cents, so why should we charge such an insane amount of money for it? Because we can. Human nature dictates that when easy money is presented, we will take the opportunity to grab it as fast as we can. The internet is just another domain to make money off of unsuspecting suckers who like pretty colors or would rather abandon their school research to shop for a new skirt. We took the time to learn how to make a web page. We learned how to write dynamic scripts and how to create pretty distracting graphics, and we are going to use our talents and our invested time to make some money. We have to eat too.

Secondly, you might be asking, "What's so wrong with making money on the internet?" There is nothing wrong with making money on the internet. My point ladies and gentlemen, is that the internet as we once conceived it, is dead. We once thought of the internet as an extensive database where users could talk to each other and share information around the world. Then it was developed. We learned what we could really do with the internet, and what we could capitalize. Most people use the internet to shop, play games, or search for things that are hard to find elsewhere. The latter of these options, searching for information would have been what the original internet developers would have aimed for, what they would've wanted, but its execution has been horrible. Today where you find most of your answers on the internet are either forums, where many users participate in discussing topics they create themselves, or on information giants like Wikipedia (again the same user created concept, just in a different form), or professional sites run by well established businesses. There are a lot of websites out there. There are too many to count, and think about how many don't fall into the above category.

What would really move the internet forward? The internet needs to be divided just like everything else in life. Like church and state, the internet should be divided into business oriented, and informational sectors. The business fanatics can have their internet, the fun internet, the one we all love, and the one we spend most of our leisure time on. We play games on the business end, we shop for clothes, we download files that we needed for our camera, we sell our old junk to collectors. Then we have a separate entity in the informational sector where we can search through databases to help us answer tax questions we might have. We can search to find out the rules to a baseball game, and we can search to find out what exactly makes some glass bulletproof. We could do all of this without being offered tax software, baseball jerseys, and new windows for our home. There would be a clear division between people looking for things to do, and people trying to find things out. There wouldn't be a need for ridiculous amounts of reprinting the same information thousands of ways, because one window site would be enough, and anything missing could simply be added on, sparing the developers the task of making their own site, and trying to recreate everything that has already been done, and then do it better. This way, anything needed could be built upon and shared just like was originally intended, and there wouldn't be swamps of information. There would be a giant online library with all the information humans would need to better themselves, at a pace never before achieved. And then there would be a giant internet shopping mall where you could piddle away your time as quickly or slowly as you wanted searching through clothes and magazines all night long. The ads could still exist on the business end, and people looking to buy things would actually find them useful. They would click and be happy, and the internet commerce as we know it would continue happily. On the other hand, people could be paid to write quality information, or to amend information on the other half of the internet, and perhaps we would have motivation to finally write an educational site about puppies to really help someone who has a new puppy, not to sell them a collar. Perhaps we would take the initiative to write a tutorial on how to install a tricky graphics driver before thousands of forums are flooded with unhappy users who had the same problems you fixed. Then the internet would be living harmoniously. Then we might actually get somewhere with all these hunks of metal tied together on one string.

Would something like that ever happen? Probably not for a long time. There would be no clear segregation of the internet without a mind-blowingly large adjustment in front of us, and several of the internet giants would not be happy with the idea, even though it would absolutely require their cooperation to set things into action. A giant internet library taking over the roll of the internet and leaving behind the entertainment is something that would put a lot of developers into a frenzy, because their formula for instant income would be flattened from the beginning. So for now, the internet is dead. Perhaps one day we will resurrect it. Perhaps not. Perhaps one of you reading this will believe this post was on to something, and that we really do need a change. Perhaps everyone will realize that Wikipedia just isn't cutting it anymore and we need something larger. Until we get things going, I believe I am going to hang up my internet arcades for a little while, and maybe try to develop a kind of super library. Maybe one of you will do the same. Ready? First one to achieve internet nirvana gets the satisfaction of bettering human society. If that isn't enough for you, you might just get a medal too.

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