OMG! Your Google Is Showing!

I wanted to talk about Easter today, but last Thursday I swore to explain why I claimed that the Internet is making you stupid. Since I played hooky last Friday rather than provide my explanation as promised, I should probably postpone my discussions of that special time of year known as Easter, when giant rabbits fiendishly hide hard-boiled chicken menstruations from innocent, naive children. Also, I need to be brief today, so we’ll see how it goes…

My basic premise is that the Internet is making you stupid in the same way that calculators made people Math stupid and Spell Check made people orthographically stupid. When the collected knowledge of the human race – including, but not limited to: Wikipedia, Dictionary.com, and the Paris Hilton sex tape – lies at your fingertips, there’s really not a very strong need to ever actually know anything.

Worse still, the Internet leads people to come to false conclusions about themselves and they end up thinking they’re really actually quite clever, and could probably slap the Canadian out of Alex Trebek with their engorged intellects, if only they appeared on Jeopardy! just once. The only problem with this way of thinking lies in the inescapable fact that Alex would never let you whip out your iPhone to Google the Final Jeopardy answer.

Internet forums are a great example of how the World Wide Web can make anyone appear to be a knowledgeable genius, while never actually increasing their intellect in the slightest. People often get involved in endless “flame wars” on these message boards, where they try to out-smart the other guy and impress everyone else with their brilliance by citing obscure knowledge plucked directly from a web page somewhere in the dark, labyrinthine corners of the Internet. Forgetting for the moment that these sorts of people could never carry on this way in an actual debate without the aid of their cyber-crutch, it’s actually understood that everyone is trying to out-Google everyone else – and it is this simple understanding that represents just how far we’ve fallen in the brains department.

My Google-Fu is strong!

When command over a search engine is the prerequisite for appearing intelligent, then the next stop along the Information Superhighway can only be 1234 Bumfuck Lane in Stupidville, Indiana. (My apologies to Indianans. I’m just tired of picking on Texas.) It is actually not only acceptable, but desired behavior to admit to out-Googling your competition. After all, if your opponent had any brains at all, they would have used better keywords and found all of the really good web pages before you did, right?

The problem extends far beyond the silliness of Internet forums, however. It stretches into everyday life, and even into the education system. I was in a bookstore the other day, and I noticed that the Cliff’s Notes section seemed over-filled. Could it be that students have realized that there is no longer a need to even bother reading the Idiot’s Version of a book? Now, with a few simple searches, you can dig up not only detailed summaries of the book, but can find all sorts of critical analyses that you can reword and pass off as your own.

If I were a teacher, I’d ban the use of the Internet as a citable source. It wouldn’t stop the rampant destruction of knowledge, but it might slow it down a little. I would demand sources be from really real books from the really real library, and I’d scour the Internet for the answers to the questions I’d ask, and make sure I come up with different ones. I would want to make things as difficult as I could for my students, just so that they would have to do what used to be standard: they’d read the damned book!

The intelligence-shrinking capacity of the Internet isn’t limited to simple research, though. No, it’s also killing the English language. The transient nature of electronic communication is breeding a grotesque and obnoxious new species of human, where the simple act of typing “Oh my god” is replaced by OMG! and for whom the ideas of grammar and punctuation are a macabre throwback to the dark olden days, when cruel and torturous souls freakishly labored over peculiar notions like subject-verb agreement and questioned the mental stability of anyone psychotic enough to end a sentence with more than one exclamation mark.

Thanks to the lightning-fast and always-on communication tools of e-mail, text messaging, and electronic chat, people don’t seem to give two shits about how they’re saying things, or even pay much attention to what they’re babbling on about. Text messaging is the most popular form of communication for kids today. They don’t spend hours on the phone anymore, incessantly chittering the inconsequential conversational detritus of the teenaged mind to their girlfriends or boyfriends. No, instead they just text each other. Maybe it’s because actual vocal communication is too demanding, and they prefer the added time that text messaging provides, so that they can figure out how best to word what they want to say – or perhaps they just want a second to quickly Google a bitchin’ pick-up line to get in the girl’s (or guy’s) pants. Who knows? More importantly, who cares?

Kids have always been stupid. I was stupid when I was a kid, and my parents were stupid when they were kids. I don’t care that teenagers ramble on about nothing for hours on end, or that they speak in their own proto-language. I truly don’t. I just know that it isn’t going to end there. They’re not going to enter their twenties and suddenly be able to speak, think, and write intelligently through some arcane magical process. They will still be stupid, only they’ll be stupid college students who, with the willing participation of their professors, will graduate truly believing that they are now intelligent people. Trust me, I lived with one of these low-hanging fruits of humanity for seven (long) years, and even after she “mastered” the ridiculously facile two-year curriculum of her tech school’s business program, she still believed that there was no difference between the words sell and sale.

Then again, this was before the days of No Child Left Behind, and what can you really expect to do when you’re working with the raw material of a girl for whom no amount of rational intervention could ever convince that Kevin Bacon wasn’t the guy on the other side of the chat window, talking to her on America On-Line at three o’clock in the morning…

I put on my robe and wizard hat…

Want some books? 'Course ya do!

NOTE:  I know times are hard and yeah, I need to make a living too, but if you want to read any of my books but can't afford to buy them right now, hit me up.

I'll take care of it.

Humor | Nonfiction
Available now from the following retailers

Have you ever lived through an experience that was so humiliating that you wanted to die, but when you tell it to all your friends, they can't stop laughing?

Have you ever made a decision that seemed like a good idea at the time, but you're still living with the hilarious consequences years later?

If so, then grab a snack, get comfortable, and prepare to have all of your own poor life choices seem just a little bit more bearable.

You're welcome.

Short Stories
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The nine stories of rage and sadness collected here range from the most intimate of human experiences to the wildest realms of magic and fantasy. The first story is a violent gut-punch to the soul, and the rest of them just hit harder from there.

Those who tough it out will find a book filled with as much hope as despair, a constant contradiction pulling you from one extreme to another.

Life might knock us down, over and over, and will the beat the ever-loving snot out of us from the time we're old enough to give it attitude until the day we finally let it win and stop getting up.

Always get back up.

Gaming | Nonfiction
Available now from the following retailers

This isn't just a book. It's a portal to other worlds where there be magic and dragons and hilarious pirates. Okay, not really. But this book is about those portals, except they're called video games.

The Life Bytes series of books take a deep dive into one man's personal journey through childhood into kinda/sorta being a responsible, competent adult as told through the magical lens of whatever video games he was playing at the time.

Part One starts way back in 1975 and meanders down various digital pathways until, oh, around about 1993 or so.

If you're feeling nostalgic for the early days of gaming or if you just want to understand why the gamer in your life loves this hobby so much, take a seat in your favorite comfy chair and crack this bad boy open.

I'll try to not be boring.

Horror
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What you are about to read is not a story. There is no beginning, middle, or end.

What follows is nothing more than a series of journal entries involving shadow people, sleep paralysis, and crippling fear. It’s not pretty, it doesn’t follow story logic, and nothing works out well in the end.

You've been warned.