The Internet Is Our Grandmother

When you need to learn how to fold a fitted sheet, what do you do? I YouTube it. Without thinking, I know there will be a video of some nice person showing me how to do this mundane task correctly and neatly. Five years ago, before YouTube existed or broadband was popular, I probably would have called my grandma. She knew everything you could need to know about keeping a home nice, baking, cooking, sewing, and cleaning. She was the kind of grandma that some how managed to make your bed  and leave a warm apple pie on your pillow in the 30 seconds it took you to sleep walk to the bathroom and back.

I was talking about this with a friend, and I realized that a significant portion of our generation grew up without learning how to keep a home, or our lessons were incomplete. As an ostensible adult of some sort, I do things like buy tables at IKEA and know the difference between drapes and curtains [insert Tyler Durden quote here]. But I don’t know how to iron slacks or get sweat stains out of my white collars or bake brownies that don’t come in a Betty Crocker box. I don’t know, of course, until I search the internet.

Our grandparents had/have storehouses of useful information about caring for your home, your stuff, and your health (mental and physical), a great encyclopedia of advice given with the occasional off-color joke or crazy story from mid century. Now, their advice is augmented by a series of tubes that tell me how to make chicken salad and more NSFW jokes than I can handle. I’m not saying the internet has replaced my perpetually enraged Polish grandfather or my tiny, impossibly sweet grandmother (think a real life Archie and Edith Bunker), nothing will ever replace them. What I am saying is that for my generation, it seems we’ve come to think of the internet as the source for information that Gen Xers would have gone to their parents or grandparents to get. Our advice from the greatest generation is crowd-sourced and digitized.

How Do You Consume the Internet?

I just finished Tyler (<3) Cowen’s Create Your Own Economy, which can be described as a study in the benefits of autistic forms of thinking. Sherlock Holmes is Cowen’s prime example, though somehow I don’t think Robert Downey Jr. is going with that interpretation. Organization, filtering, retaining, and recalling massive amounts of data and sensory input are the great benefits of the autistic mind. Cowen sees autism as a condition that was waiting for the internet and didn’t even realize it. While it’s popular to write on how new technologies are hurting us, Cowen shows how the enormous tools for finding and organizing data on the internet lets us externalize a lot of tedious information and make way for other pursuits that interest us.

I used to have a bookmarks page with something like 50 websites that I would rotate through at a blitzkrieg pace, devouring news stories, looking at pictures, reading forums, etc. A lot of those sites were aggregators like Fark and Digg (and Drudge, ugh, I’m sorry). Then I discovered RSS and Google Reader. With that simple discovery, I no longer surf the web. My entire internet experience is filtered through the lens of Google: email, calendar, documents, and reader. It’s glorious. Yeah, PT uses WordPress instead of Blogger software, but that’s because WordPress is, you know, better.

Now, I know what you (not you, HIM, holding the signed copy of Rushkoff), are thinking: Google is a giant corporation controlling your experience of the internet. Wrong. Google is a company that makes money by giving me (and the rest of you, I suppose) tools that makes the internet more like how I actually want it. I chose to whom I subscribe on Reader. Furthermore, I don’t even read most of the stories. I can still surf the net any other way if I want to. Google doesn’t have a monopoly on readers (feedburner is a competitor, Safari and Firefox have built in readers) but I like their system best. What Google Reader lets me do is outsource filtering, ordering (chronologically), and filing (I can search Reader items) the parts of the internet I care about. Nor does it make me complacent. I’d say I add and delete about three sites a week. Which, of the 60 or so sites I follow, makes for 20% turn over a month.

Since it’s Friday and I know a bunch of you are at work twiddling your thumbs wishing for something to occupy your underutilized mind, I posit this question:

How do you actually experience the internet? Do you surf (old school, follow hyperlinks and putter around websites, surf)? Do you just click shared links on Facebook? Do you just use aggregators (Digg, Reddit, Fark)? Do you use an RSS reader? Think! Figure it out!