I finally get why the TV was called the tube. I didn’t get it before because it didn’t really affect me the same as the generation that knew life before TV (those who coined the word ‘tube’). I’m finding now though that internet is our generation’s TV, at least for some of us. At least for me. I didn’t understand the feeling of being sucked into something that isn’t real and beginning to feel like maybe it’s everything else outside that isn’t real. I get it now that I have grown up all my life experiencing this phenomenon so i glance over it now as normal and dismiss this feeling saying it contains little significance.

Just like drugs this new generation needed something better, something more effective. Video games came close and that industry has made outrageous leaps and bounds over the years because of it. But still it was all fake; the underlying basis had no connection to our real lives. We were controlling people who were obviously fictitious and who we had no reason to care about. So then improvement of gameplay fell by the wayside as game designers went after deeper storylines to draw players in and better graphics to make players feel that these were real people instead of just pixels. They worked to create a new world for the gamer with everything that their lives were missing. These were very effective, but only for some. Others still wouldn’t buy it and needed something else.

Enter social networking and blogging. Now it was REAL. Things that you did here could affect the way you interact with people in real life now. Things start to get scary though when a medium is so effective at making itself feel real that it begins to make the rest of the world feel fake. I for one have just realized that I feel this quite often now that I spend a lot of time on my own with only social networking through the internet as my outlet to others. I think that different mediums affect different people differently and that no one is better than another at accomplishing its mission of subjugation of reality. I have found my kryptonite however, and it has become my new goal to look at the world as it should be looked at properly and not through the lens of the internet.