nah, never, there’s always the gossip pages, poking fun at celebrities, TOm and Lorenzo, reruns of Rupauls Drag Race, etc. etc. If all else fails to keep me enthralled, then I turn to the online library databse of my Alma mater skim the newspapers (I admint to going to Page Six first). Then I’m done, but only after a quick recheck of my top websites, then maybe I’m done!
I think what is happening is that the Internet tubes are filling up with sediment. I turn the tap on expecting enlightenment, and what comes out is an increasingly smelly sludge of LOLz, Rickrolls, Facebook links and You Tube video comments.
I run out of internet on occasion. Being a life-long information junkie and a latecomer to the internet, the first several years of online surfing certainly were a thrill compared to the more recent ones. Over time it’s become clear the Internet isn’t a bottomless well of data. It’s a surprisingly small puddle, in fact. I have many obscure interests I find little information about online, yet score lots of hits at my small University library. One can get hundreds or at least dozens of Google hits for almost any subject, but after browsing them through I often find a single source has been simply copy-pasted over and over again. Sometimes the primal reference is badly dated and full of errors, and the online version usually a shallow skim of the original work. So much for online data breadth and depth. Also, many of the good webpages on obscure stuff are updated extremely slowly, if at all. Some of them have essentially the same content as they did in 2002, only with added advertising. Ground-breaking no more.
Most of the exciting online discoveries I make these days are either online copies of very old books or articles in hard-to-get scientific journals, available in paper form but quicker and cheaper to check online. Most of the time I find I need to hit a real library to get anywhere, though.
See I’m checking back again aren’t I?
Not until I finish reading TvTropes.
There’s always Zombo.com.
http://www.iambored.com will last you a good session or 2. Internet spades made a BIG impact but I can’t even get through a game now. Straight Dope was my heaven for a nice amount of time and is one of my regulars. Technology is moving too fast. One national no internet day would make a big difference.
Been there. Done that. Over it. Now the Web is my backup entertainment. My primary entertainment? Two words: Second Life. It’s freaking INCREDIBLE what they’ve done, if you know all the wrong places. And I do.
Stumbleupon is my channel flipping substitute.
Nope… it’s the only place I can watch Al Jazeera as I am currently in the USA (we can get Al Jazeera in Prague on the normal cable company package).
Unfortunately in the Land of the Free, news sources that might be objective are not welcome.
I’ve just got the internet back after 10 days with a dead phone line. I’m really not, I’ve realised that there isn’t much I need to do each day but damn I’m never going to be bored with the internet again.
Reminds me of a very old segment from the early days of David Letterman: Dave was doing a “very special” piece where he was helping some kid (say, “Billy”) through the grieving process after his favorite show was cancelled. (I think it might have been “Sliders”)
Billy was quietly distraught and confessed to Dave: “Sometimes I feel like I never want to watch TV again.” Dave became still, put his hand on the lad’s shoulder and looking him straight in the eye, intoned: “Billy, I want you to promise me that you won’t ever say that again, not even as a joke.”
“No, Sir, when a man is tired of the Internet, he is tired of life; for there is online all that life can afford.” -Samuel Johnson, slightly updated.
90% of everything is crap.
That’s what they invented MMORPGs for.
My people! I have found you at last!
Lately, I’ve had that same “I’ve run out of internet” and that’s usually a signal that I’m really bored and need to go do something active (for me, that means walking upstairs and grabbing a book to read). I also think it means I’m bored inside too (does that make sense?).
Glad I am not alone.
I miss Usenet so much. Yes, it’s still there and it has more traffic now than ever, but most of it is downloading from binaries.
The good old Usenet of the late 90s and the IRC channels are long a thing of the past. It was fun to go on IRC and pick a channel and talk with people about things. It was fun to read flame wars on Usenet.
OK it’s nice to have a board like this where moderators keep the language in line and the tone civil (thanks mods btw) but it was also fun to have Usenet and unregulated places where you could read the flames.
I love to design unique websites THAT LOOK simple, because to me they have character. Yes it looks amateurish, but that’s my goal. I don’t want to look all uniform.
I don’t like Facebook as it’s not a way to meet new people like MySpace a long, long time ago was.
Facebook is more of an web extension of real life friendships. At least with MySpace people would see your space and ask you about it or talk to you.
Yes, I can meet people in the real world, but I like to also meet people in different countries and talk about obscure things. One of the most active sites I was on, was a site devoted to “Prisoner” (“Prisoner: Cell Block H”) an old Australian soap opera.
It amazes me how like 50 people who love that show could’ve kept up such an active site for five years (It suddenly ended for some reason)
I think Wikipedia also helped to make the Internet less exciting as we all go there first thing off to check things out. Also scraper sites with Google ads (and other sites) scrap and push far too many Wikipedia sites too high up, thus crowding out the other sites, so there are cool things, but you have to look for them long and hard.
P2P sites have been pushed out of mainstream to exclusive club only sites where you have to know someone personally or go online and actually pass a test to get in. So there is limited viewpoints.
It’s also becomes more and more difficult to find new sites with the way Google works. Such sites like Google, eBay and the like are “effective monopolies.” (Yes, they are not actual monopolies, but they are so dominate it’ll take a long hard effort with a lot of money to compete “effectively” with them.
I too was sad when Sliders was cancelled so I bought it on DVD.
There are many days where I am bored of the internet. This site goes a long ways in keeping me from giving up completety.
I"d say 1/3 interesting, and 2/3 boring anymore.
No. I can confidently say I have perused more of the internet than at least 85% of users. Yet I’m less bored than them because there is still more out there waiting to be found. More than any single person can ever discover in a lifetime.
The internet has not changed. You have.
There are plenty of sites I can go to when I really feel like surfing. salon.com, cracked.com, fark.com, digg.com, etc. Then there is hulu.com, clicker.com, youtube.com if I feel like watching video. And then there’s Flash games, PC game mods, programming, etc. There is really too much to do.
Even when I am away from the internet I often go back on my iPod Touch to imdb.com or Wikipedia to research something.