I don't like the internet

Yep, I did it. I set up a myspace web page a couple of weeks ago. Dear God. I had a facebook page for a while, but dropped it a few months ago because of the silliness of the applications and the shameless self-promotion. A friend of mine told me that a band we liked in the eighties had made him a “friend” and I was shocked that they were still around. He seemed fairly proud to have been befriended by the band so I went to check the page out; they have over 680,000 “friends” I’m sure they would recognize the guy in the street as an acquaintance.
Since setting up the page my email has been flooded with friend requests from accounts being represented by pictures of scantily clad whores. The software is fairly easy to circumnavigate, yet cumbersome as hell because of the amount of advertisements and pure b.s. that comes up on each screen. It seems that you must use the correct combination of browsers, the moon must be in the right phase and you must hold your mouth a certain way to get everything to work correctly and load properly. I wonder if “owl” Gore envisioned the internet he created as being used to promote people and their interests by posting “cool” out of focused pictures with catchy phrases designed to entice me to click on them in an attempt to call them a friend… only to be turned down because I myself am not that cool.
I have found a couple of people on there that I haven’t spoken to for quite a while, so that’s been interesting. I had to tweak on the settings to stop the flood of email from the whores, who I am sure are interested in my looks or political views and not my wallet, its almost as bad as classmates…. Here are all the people that you wanted to catch up with right here! You simply must pay homage to us by giving us a few measly dollars so that you can speak with them…. All I have to do is update to the benevolence of “gold” status..
I haven’t been able to load pictures on the page, it just sits there, I haven’t been able to access quite a bit of crap on the site, it just sits there. I have, so far, been admonished for using the “F” word on my page and told I don’t have enough friends. I have only had anywhere from three to five friends at any given time in my life why should on line be any different?
I listen to people talk about what they do on the internet and most of it seems silly. I will not purchase anything on line; I will not sell anything on line; I will not seek out romance on line… my wife wouldn’t like that… Thus far I have used it to express a few thoughts here, keep up on current news and read what others have to say about different subjects, and look at the odd naked person
As an information retrieval system it seems to work well, but as a working tool… I have my doubts. I have no interest in watching women eat poop, playing on line games, or watching people trying to become famous by doing silly things on video sites. I don’t send forwards in email or take quizzes or make reservations, so why do I pay fifty bucks a month for a portal to human vice? So I can keep up with what people who hate me have to say? It seems so sometimes....
It becomes a question of human nature. I can find things that I need sometimes; I can converse with people I haven’t seen in a while. I can also keep people I like who live far away informed as to what’s happening.
Those things are good about the information exchange I suppose. But I think it really comes down to folks just wanting not to be alone and getting their ideas skewed a bit by others influence. Things that aren’t that important suddenly start to seem as if they are, that’s what I hate about what the internet has done to me. Even microsoft word dictates that I should capitalize the word internet, not to mention the word microsoft… I have a strong feeling that my relationship with myspace, the internet and indeed computers in general is coming to a hasty conclusion….