A friend were recently talking about how great the internet used to be, vis a vis hilarious videos. It was a revelatory experience as it has literally been years since Magical Trevor, Salad Fingers, and the GI Joe PSAs last flitted across my consciousness. Naturally, being a well-renowned internet theorist, I had a duty to re-enjoy all those gems of yesteryear. Ahh, good times.

It was then that I realized a tragic reality: it has been ages since I came across something on the internet that really floored me. In the past, internet memes have given me some profound life-altering experiences. I don’t believe I’ve ever laughed as hard as I did at the All Your Base compilation video, and noone who has truly known goatse.cx can say they are the same person they used to be. These were heartbreaking memes of staggering genius.

Nowadays, internet hilarity is rampant. Many of today’s memes are quite solid. Some could be described as brilliant. But the vast majority are drivel. They are momentarily amusing but ultimately puerile. When compiled into the “blog” format which is oh-so-the-rage as of late, they can provide a consistent stream of pleasant diversions that is certainly a boon in the long run, but the individual offerings are generally insignificant. In short we are being inundated with crap.

At least, that’s what it feels like.

There is room for doubt here. It’s occurred to me that I’m slowly creeping up on a conspicuous age. Is it possible that I’m becoming… uncool? Out of touch? Am I merely a jaded old pill idealizing an imaginary Golden Age of Internet Memes? Isn’t the internet pretty much what is used to be… just moreso?

One of the really interesting things going on these days is the way the internet is going totally mainstream. Well, scratch that — the internet’s been mainstream for a while. What’s happening now is that the incredibly nerdy bits of the internet are going mainstream. Witness Kate’s blog post about rickrolling. It’s basically a microcosm of what happened to the internet proper from 1996-2006. Except unlike the basement usenet operators of the 90s today’s esoteric cult of nerds has a pretty good grasp on the dynamics of the media industry, so they are pushing outwards just as hard as the mainstream is pushing inward. I mean, it took, like, just a year before I heard the founder of icanhascheezburger being interviewed on the radio.

So memes are mainstream now and becoming increasingly so every second. And what happens when anything goes mainstream? It gets crappy, of course. Why does it get crappy? Well, you know… cuz the mainstream sucks.

Actually, I think something unique is happening. The whole online prosumer thing is hitting the world in force, and suddenly every 14-year-old (not just the geeky ones) are accustomed to the idea that something they do on the computer can make them famous. And you know, the great thing about computers, they make everything so easy. For the young north american, there is pretty much no entry barrier. And that’s great! Sure it is. But when you’ve got every single kid on the continent storming across that non-existent barrier, what you’ve got is a huge influx of dilettantes.

The really amazing memes that took my breath away in the early days were painstaking labours of love. But photoshopping some text onto a cat? It takes five minutes. In fact, many (if not most) of memes these days come about by accident, or on a whim. This is the magic of Youtube: sharing a moment captured via film requires only the barest modicum of effort. Turning on a camera and pressing upload is lightyears away from spending terrible terrible hours in Flash.

I’m no Andrew Keen. I believe in the democratization of media and I am not disgusted by the idea of consuming amateur products. But it does wear one down. Truthfully, there are still excellent memes out there, and there are budding animators and serious film prodigies doing awesome stuff every day. But the reality — and this comes down to one of my central gripes with the world today — is that a flood of mediocrity deadens one senses to the few drops of awesomeness. And you have to spend a lot of time sifting through the chaff to find the wheat. Am I mixing enough metaphors here?

You can’t argue with reality though. This is what the Internet is: it is the place where 16-year old girls go to glitterize their myspace pages. It is the place that is cooler than all the other places. Everyone is communicating and creating… but tragically, not everyone is a creative genius. We’ll always have memes (thank god!) but sadly, I think the days of wonderful little discoveries at every turn are behind us for good. At least, until Internet 2 I guess.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 25th, 2008 at 11:55 am and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.