By Susie Cagle at Urlesque.com
Tag Archive: Internet
As Ask Jeeves falls into the lesser-used realms of internet at 1% of searches, it’s important to look back and remember a time when this wasn’t so.
1996: Ask Jeeves was created. People marveled at a search engine where they didn’t have to deal with pesky key words and could ask a long, clunky question, instead.
1998: Ask Jeeves gets taken over by porn.
2005: Ask Jeeves becomes simply Ask.com.
2010: Ask.com gives up its search engine aspirations altogether, and becomes a site on which people ask questions and never receive answers.
Let’s all take a moment of silence for Jeeves.
America has always been known as a country with a flexible class system in which intelligent, hard working people can come to and make a life for themselves; After all, it’s the American Dream. Undoubtedly, times are changing. Between our in-the-pit economy, outsourcing, the crashed housing market, high unemployment ect. ect., the middle class is on the outs, separation between rich and poor, hard to get ahead, bla bla bla…
So how does a genuine, passionate gay boy from the projects get ahead in today’s economy? I think Antoine Dodson answers that question quite well.
I’m being dead serious. Honey bought a house for his family, so they could move out of the projects where his sister was in danger of being raped. He got some fine extensions, and even got to perform at the BET awards.
This is, of course, in addition to the fame that the internet provided him–with song remixes, Halloween costumes, and even spin-off memes. 
What Antoine encountered is no longer a freak occurrence. I’m sure he majority of us could easily spot David After Dentist and Double Rainbow guy if we saw them on the street. Likewise, they (or other people in their lives) have found ways to live on their interfame.
Other members of our lovely interweb are making money on their brains. Bloggers such as Jezebel and Jennifer McCreight (or Blag Hag) have developed internet fame on their ideas and writing skill alone. Between these extremes lie people like Mark Zukerburg and Eric Nakagawa (creator of icanhascheezburger) who have made famous sites.
All of the above are presumably banking on their talents thanks to the internet–whether it’s their talent for being wacky, their commentary on the world, or their ability to make a product that people love to use. So as our culture moves closer and closer to an internet-run society, is the web the Everyman’s new way to achieve the American Dream?
The internet and children–it’s a touchy subject.
Currently, it’s a labyrinth that parents navigate for their young children, resulting in various moral viewpoints from Booba1234 (David Devore) who felt comfortable posting the infamous David After Dentist video and then selling merchandise once the video hit it big, to many internet users who refuse to even discuss their children over public forums.
It seems that the typical blogging parent refers to their child by some sort of silly nickname, and, if they post pictures, either blot out the child’s eyes or post only pictures in which you can’t see said child’s face. (There are some bloggers that take the time to make up a nickname for their children, then post pictures clearly depicting them, but this logic confuses me so I won’t discuss it.) My question is, “Is this necessary?”
Clearly there are dangers on the internet–dangerous people, dangerous situations, and I doubt many people want to become a childhood internet meme. However, before the internet, all these dangers were just as real. We simply felt safer about them. In fact, in some ways the internet has actually made our children safer. Thanks to the National Sex Offender Registry, for instance, you can now research and find out if your neighbor is a sex offender. Once upon a time, you couldn’t do that, and we all lived in 1950’s housewife-ignorant bliss.
Facebook is, perhaps, the best example of our changing attitudes toward the internet. Since it’s humble beginnings for Harvard students, the social network has become increasingly public. Every time FB changes its privacy settings the old fogy twenty-somethings go ape shit, yet the teenagers don’t seem to care. In fact, Mark Zuckerberg stated that the reason for the constant privacy changes is because, “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.”
As evidenced by Jessi Slaughter, teenagers should not be making large, life changing decisions involving the internet. It’s in their nature to make stupid decisions, but as far as the public world of the internet goes, what is somewhat scary to us is simply normal to them. Similarly, I am not afraid to go out of my house at night or go to the mall alone, because I was not raised to be. When I was young and went to these places, I was under the protection of my parents. When I got older, they eventually let me go alone, armed with the common sense and good decision-making skills they taught me. The internet is the same way.
It may be that little Emily, whose mother is a blogger, will emerge no more screwed up than my friend Kristy, whose mother wrote a parenting article for a magazine when she was a child. She is now a successful, smart, capable adult, and her mother didn’t feel the need to refer to her as “pookie-face.”
The Death of Glitter 
