It’s revolutionized your life, right? Just like the marketing campaigns said it would. Your life today looks nothing like it did 10 years ago. We all work from home, buy everything online, and well, rarely get outside to do anything.
Come on! No wonder the whole dot-com buzz is now considered a bust. Talk about hyped up expectations. Personally I think all those caffeine-addicted, perky marketing types who built up the hype should be drug out into the street and shot. Or maybe just be forced to sit through each other’s advertising campaigns. No – I’m all for humane treatment, the shooting would be much better.
For example, recently, and this is after all the big hype has died down, there have been these huge billboards all over town for XXXX (I won’t mention the product/service/item/etc. specifically as they might be the teenciest bit upset if/when this is published, assuming of course they’re still in business). Random, all over the board, obscure statements about the XXXX product/service/whatever the heck it is. So, I go to the website like the slave of capitalism and marketing that I am as the billboard directs me to do. What do I find? An explanation? No! A statement I know came right from the mouth of one of those perkies that wears hip little outfits and has trendy hair and eyeglasses. “Come back soon to find all about XXX!!” Why the **** do you think I came to this site in the first place? I swore I wouldn’t come back… well, I’ll update you on that one in a few weeks when I finally cave in to my innate feline curiousity and check the site out again.
After all the hype, we say, yeah, the Internet and the web didn’t revolutionize my life. Only problem is, it did. We just don’t realize it. The fact of the matter is, the advance of the Internet into millions of homes (unfortunately we’re not there yet where we can say it goes into every home in the U.S. or the world) did change things in a major way for good. For the marketing types who are now working as bellhops and waitresses, the conundrum wasn’t so much that change didn’t occur, as it didn’t occur in the exact way they had specified, in the amounts specified, and in the exact timeline declared.
Think about it. Where do you go to get directions now to that party you’re going to next weekend? Mapquest.com (Can I get advertising dollars for putting that in?) In fact, you probably accepted one of those “e-invites” to even find out about the party (which probably had a link to directions on some map website). Phone numbers? I get them online. News? I get it online. Every company on earth has a URL now.
The world wide web is most definitely a new medium of information and communication that is here to stay. Will there be some buying and selling done on it? Yes. (I shudder at the word e-commerce now, or e-anything really, so I try to avoid those expressions). Who knows what else there will be. There are neat ideas thrown out there every day. Some will make it, some won’t. A lot of them will make it if they’re given some time to get their feet. Look at Amazon.com – they declared their first profit the other day.
Yet it still seems like every naysayer out there is declaring the death of the internet. Really, I think the problem is the media. Nothing can ever just be declared or analyzed in a calm, state-the-facts kind of fashion anymore. If it’s not THE HOTTEST THING EVER and doesn’t have a headline like THE DEATH OF THE DOT-COM ERA, it’s just not worth spending the two minutes on it that we otherwise would have spent. The internet in some sort of twisted circle sort of fed this: now you can just browse the headlines as links, and unless it really pops out at you, you can just scroll down and move on. News briefs online, on TV, on the radio, are short and sweet and only mention the “big” stuff. When it turned out that new dot-com company openings/closings and related announcements were really about as exciting as saying “Joe’s Hardware in Littleville, TX opened today”, the media decided the industry was as good as dead and no longer worth really reporting on.
Personally I look forward to the new technologies that keep being offered: new PDAs, new cell phones, new ways to integrate different technologies. Hopefully on the next big mad dash, people will at least have enough presence of mind to think “maybe I should figure out how to make money doing this at some point, and not just do it because it sounds cool”. Sure, a couple of college grads can make a web site that searches other sites. But can it be a multi-million dollar company? I’m talking about Yahoo.com, and yes, they might actually be a viable company here before too long, but at the height of the frenzy they were being regarded as some sort of god-like entity that could influence global economies with a few choice words. What do they do? Web site stuff – email, news, sell a few things. That’s it. Talk about over hype!
Regardless of what becomes of the Internet, the gay community can be proud of what it contributed to the cause, and can be sure of the fact that the web and the internet is here to stay. As the saying goes, if there’s one industry out there that’s older than all the others it’s sex. One of the biggest drivers behind the internet’s original growing popularity had to be gay men logging on to gay pornography sites. (I checked my personal book of facts on that one, it’s true. Plus, I was right there with the best of them.) And we’re going to keep doing it, so there’s no fear of it going away anytime soon.
Although how anyone could have the patience to download a video over dial up internet connections is beyond me (even if it is titled “two tinks going at it”). I’ve hated it when I’ve had dial up,and loved my high speed connections when I’m lucky enough to have them. For the gay geek, DSL, cable modems, or some other form of high speed internet access are essential.
I would say I’m being redundant saying ‘gay geek’ but every time I think they’re synonyms, I meet the rare queer who squirms at the thought of technology and absolutely fears getting on the computer. I recall one time I was playing one of those group games. You know, the ones where you draw a card with a word on it, and you have to get someone to guess the word. Well, I drew the word ‘software’. So in the process of getting my friend (who it would turn out is very NOT computer literate) to guess the word, I use the phrase “You put this onto a computer”. Now true, this is a bit vague. But still, I would think guesses would include software, programs, video games, etc – maybe even “monitor”. No, what do I get as the guess? “A vase!” My friend exclaims, his hands and face animated as he thinks we’ve just earned some points for our team. Well, turns out we lost that game.
Technology isn’t for everyone I suppose. But it is for me. As I walk around with my cell phone, PDA, and mp3 player about me at any given time. I sit in front of a computer all day at work, and then come home and jump online. I am THE ideal market audience for any marketer (yeah, those people I hate) at a technology company. As soon as they show the product on TV (I don’t care what it is or does, it just has to be high-tech), I turn to my partner and go “Oooh I want one!”. Ian just turns to me and looks at me. “It’s expensive, you’d never use it, and it’s pointless to have a cell phone that can also work as a web cam.”
I suppose he’s right. He’s so practical in those matters. I’m always thinking bigger picture. You know, “if I buy this today, I’m encouraging innovation in the critical field of cell phone integration with other technologies that aren’t necessarily a good idea to integrate with cell phones”. I mean, there have been some bad choices of technology integration lately. Cell phones that take small, fuzzy pictures. Giant PDAs that you can hold up to the side of your face and use like a cell phone, getting the touchscreen dirty in the process (yes, some of us don’t have oil free complexions on our faces). And yes, I did consider getting one of those for a while. All in all though, they’re not all bad ideas, and I figure it takes a lot of bad ideas before you get to a good one, so it’s best to have people innovating and trying things out than just sitting around and waiting for a good thing to happen. That said, I’m going to go now and log on so I can buy a new cell phone/PDA/camera/cologne dispenser that also tells me the location of the nearest Starbucks.