The Internet Will Turn Us All Into 13-Year-Old Girls

Once people expected that the net would turn us all into geeks. Well, it makes sense. If the instant access to all of the world's information didn't geekify you, surely learning how to fight Internet Explorer and the bizarre interfaces of many early web apps would....

But the most popular use for the net--after porn--seems to be LiveJournal. And the most popular use for LiveJournal seems to be reading journals of people you'd never talk to in real life and gossiping about them behind their back.

This all reminds me of my sister in 6th grade. "Ohmigod, did you see what Pam wrote on her notebook?"

Except instead of 13-year-old girls who will grow out of it faster then fluorescent sweats and leg warmers, it's everyone. Geeks, artists, parents, people who should have something better to do with their life all want to ask me--via email, from across the room, even out at clubs--"Ohmigod, did you see what Pam wrote at http://livejournal.com/pamsnotebook?"

No, I didn't see. And I don't care. I don't know Pam, I don't want to know Pam, and I'd rather read a good book or the news or even some hideous Microsoft sample code than read up on what Pam's saying about her friends--or, as seems to more often be the case, what she ate for breakfast today. If her life is not interesting to me in person or over email, why would it be interesting when written up in tedious, rambling detail?

There's a theory floating around in linguistics that humans developed language specifically for gossip. For a good example, see Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language by Robin Dunbar.

But even if that's true, we're only designed to handle gossip about the 50-100 people in our local tribe. TV added dozens of soap opera characters and hundreds of celebrities to our repertoire. Now LiveJournal adds thousands of random strangers. Is there a point where enough gossip is enough?

I'll bet the answer is no. After all, look at porn. (Well, you probably already do....)

Until about 30,000 years ago, if you saw a naked woman, that meant a real woman was naked right in front of you: a living chance to outcompete your neighbors in the Darwinian sweepstakes. But then someone invented art.

You draw a stick figure with a couple of circles to represent tits, and suddenly you've found a way to fool your brain: all the pleasure of looking at a naked woman without having to fight the other guys for her, bring home food for her, or clean up your dirty loincloths.

Of course a stick figure only works for unsophisticated cavemen or 13-year-old boys, but the cave paintings and pocket sculptures got better, and eventually we reached the point where you can download thousands of high-quality videos of beautiful girls spreading themselves for the camera.

If that's not enough porn, LiveJournal probably isn't enough gossip. Hence MySpace, and dozens of imitators of LJ and MS, and Blogspot, and....

Yeah, I know, there were also cave paintings of deer and bison, and there are also blogs about politics and music and software, but just as nothing comes close to porn for total bandwidth usage, I have a feeling nothing comes can beat blog-gossip for total eyeball-seconds.

Well, at least the kids are reading....