Internet Kismet

I think one of the more interesting things about Facebook is when I see two people, both of whom I have known for years but have never met each other, suddenly hooking up. I have narrowed down this anomaly's cause to be one of three potential possibilities:


1. Fate
2. The Butterfly Effect
3. The fact that I lived 25 years in a state with the 10th lowest population


Regardless of the reason, I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume this didn't happen as often 20 years ago, when the "internet" as we know it was just getting its wings to take dream, and social media meant seeing a movie with a friend. Hell, I'm living proof of the new way of things. I met my wife on MySpace.


Douglas Adams, who you may know as the author of the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, wrote a lesser known series in which the protagonist solves crimes based on the interconnectedness of all things. That was back in 1987. If only he knew about what you could find with Google in 2011. It isn't even a radical concept anymore. Pretty much every existing thing that anyone knows about at all is on the internet in some shape or form.


The real question is whether or not this amazing development is the result of an evolutionary improvement or if it is even making us smarter at all. It's hard to look at a news feed or Facebook wall these days without thinking we've somehow taken a step back. And yet, there's really more to it than enabling the idiots en masse.


Will a swift insurgence of stupidity cause a decline in civilization? On the one hand, it's hard to miss the physical manifestations of it. Crime, ADHD, the Teletubbies, etc. These things are the by-product of a rapidly progressing species I think, so there's some hope that right now we're just evolving quickly and weeding out the crap as fast as we can. Can't get it all at the rate it comes at us yet. That could be wishful thinking too. I don't exactly hold out a lot of hope for mankind in general.


Despite that cynicism, it's still interesting to see what the internet has forced us into becoming: honest citizens. Everything from Facebook making us use (even WANT to use) our real names and destroying the idea of privacy as we know it, to the idea of employing a Google search to find a person's every misstep in life, people are starting to come around to the idea that we've built our own traffic cameras to catch ourselves with. That simple outcome at least gives me a chuckle since I can't tell if it's just completely ironic or destiny at work. Either way, we seem to have kicked ourselves in the mouth with a shoe full of crow. Strangely, for the better.