The other day, someone read part of a passage in a recently published book describing how the internet has impacted the use of "spare" time, and not necessarily in a negative way. As the television became increasingly ubiquitous in the past, watching TV became the typical leisure activity. Now, however, younger generations are spending less time watching TV and more time on the internet actually doing things, sometimes even contributing pro-bono for internet organizations that provide valuable services to the world. People are communicating (sometimes civilly and intelligently) on forum spaces, helping catalogue files or images for organizations like NASA, and much more.
On the other hand, the author cites one internet phenomenon, as an example of many, which he seems to represent as worse than rotting away in front of the tube: the lolcat. The "art" form of taking a cute picture of an animal, typically a cat, and adding an incorrectly-spelled caption to inspire some sort of humor. Anyone can make them (though supposedly there's an unspoken code as to how to "correctly" create these images, such as using phoenetic spelling), and they contribute absolutely nothing to the world with their existence.
Okay, forgive my defensiveness, but I think the hours I've spent laughing over those images, some of which would actually constitute "witty" (like this one), were not useless. Humor's a valuable thing, even what this author might call low-brow. And there's something to be said for adorable pictures of monorail kittehs slumped over banisters, am I right? Is it wrong to not devote all our time to constructive action? What's so horribly wrong about stopping to laugh at pictures of cats?
My crankiness on this point is somewhat elevated by my growing frustration with a laptop that appears to have breathed its last. Perhaps I'll be in a better mood when I figure out a plan for extracting the files from this corpse.
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