Free live sex chat
Recently on South Park, the entire town was going crazy because the Internet had stopped working. No more porn, no more Myspace, no more YouTube; it was all shut off. People were acting like zombies, walking around aimlessly, not sure what to do with themselves. Then they went into a whole Grapes of Wrath sequence, which a lot of people didn’t get. Really, who has seen this 1940 film recently?
Anyway, this made me start thinking: what would America do if the Internet just quit working? I thought in particular of booking a hotel, because an older co-worker asked me to try to find one on hotels.com that was near a certain area. She said something like “isn’t there something on the computer where you can find hotels? I think my daughter uses it.” Back in the ol’ days, people would have to call the operator and ask them for the phone number of hotels in a certain area and then call around to check the availability of rooms. Or they could call the place that they are trying to find a hotel close to and ask someone there for the names of nearby hotels (and numbers, if they happened to know them), and then call the hotels. People had to have a much higher degree of patience with other people, because you had to deal with them a lot. You also had to call friends to talk to them; call companies when you had questions about a product or service; call airports to book flights; you get the idea. As attached as we are to our cell phones today, we really did rely on telephones a lot more two decades ago.
And just think of all of the other things we could no longer do. You could no longer look on IMDB to see a list of every movie Julia Roberts has ever been in. You couldn’t put pictures of yourself and your friends on your Myspace page, or vamp it up so that everyone that sees it is jealous thinks your life is really interesting. There would be no Internet dating, Wikipedia, or, dare I say it, YouTube. We could no longer keep ourselves entertained by watching films of cute pets, gross stunts, or amateur music videos, and there would be no more YouTube stars, like the “Chocolate Rain” guy or the dramatic prairie dog. And when it comes to music, we would have to go to the store and by CD’s, because there would be no way to burn them at home and no Ipods to carry around in your pocket. You would have to buy a bulky CD player and carry that around, which is so not hip, or actually listen to what’s going on in the world around you. Boring!
We would no longer be able to freak ourselves out with WebMD by “telling it” what our symptoms are and browsing through a list of serious and deadly diseases that we may have contracted. And what would students do? They would actually have to spend time in a library doing research. They would physically have to leave their home to go to a place full of musty old books, look through a card catalogue, and then finally find the information they are looking for (which would more than likely be outdated). They wouldn’t be able to type in the term “hemophilia”, and see over a million articles on the subject pop up, many of which they can probably plagiarize. It is pretty difficult for teachers to check the whole Internet for every student’s article.
Guys would have to suffer the embarrassment of going to the video store to rent porn, or have it sent to them through the mail (and hope that their wives don’t make it to the mailbox before they do.) There would be no free pornographic pictures, “up skirt” shots of celebrities, or videos of things I don’t even want to think about, and they couldn’t have every one of things going on the same screen in different windows within seconds. How could any guy ever get off?!
And the worst thing of all? There would be no Associated Content. Everyone who writes here would have to go to journalism school and become a journalist for a newspaper or magazine, or type up articles, print them out, find someone to try to sell them to, and get turned down over and over again. And even if they do sell one, they would have to repeat the process every time they had a great article they wanted to get our to the world. A world without the Internet is a very cold place.
There would be an upside, however. If I didn’t have the Internet, I would probably get more exercise, read more books, watch more movies, paint more, and get more work done. There would be no more identity theft, websites devoted to things like pedophilia, violent acts committed and recorded on webcam to be put on sites like YouTube, or any of the stupid, gross and cheesy E-mail forwards that we all get, just to name a few things.
But we are a fast-paced society, and we need things fast, so there’s no way anyone would want to get rid of the Internet anytime soon. The South Park episode is pretty funny, but there is a lot of truth to it. We are definitely more comfortable using the Internet to accomplish things in life than actually going out into the big, scary world to do so, but the Internet is becoming a big, scary world in itself.