The Internet

It's 1996, and after a few short years of the "World Wide Web" fad, things have begun to settle down. This Internet thing has really changed the game.

I've only got a few minutes on the modem before I'm inevitably kicked off, but my news reader pulls down articles for all the top headlines for the past three days in just a couple of minutes. It's all text, but I can see how multimedia might be added to news feeds in the future. Well, I'm good to go! I have all my reading material right here, full to the brim with content, and I can get on with my day. I can even load a few of these up to my PDA.

The World Wide Web

It's 2013, and I load up my news reader. Wow, lots of stuff in here since last night. I think I should remove these Reddit feeds. I don't get much use out of the CNN ones, either, since they're basically just headlines and going to the website bugs me to install their app. That's pretty much the case everywhere.

Screw it, I'll just browse Facebook.

N.B.: I initially wrote a lengthy discussion on the plight of the "modern consumer of information." You know, everyone who tries to keep up with news and other things using the Internet? Then I had the epiphany that the Internet isn't to blame — it's the World Wide Web's fault.

It's the amalgamation of every content producer's own vision of how you should find and consume content. It's not a fat pipe of raw information for consumption at your liesure. It's a gully hole of sometimes original, usually regurgitated media that is presented in whatever haphazard way deemed necessary. And most of it all stinks of advertising and poor grammar these days.

Sure, the World Wide Web is great. It has a lot of redeeming qualities and is actually legitimately useful for some things. But for the love of everything, it's about time for news to be transported as data, not as a product.

This written work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.