How influential is the internet?

The Internet. It's ubiquitous. Everyone is advertising on it. You old friend from high school has a facebook, your priest or paster has a google plus, you list old junk you never used on eBay, hoping someone will buy it. And you just snagged that awesome T-shirt on amazon. These are just some of the things the Internet allows you to do. There is no debate that it is a great tool.

But, like all tools, can be used as a weapon. Many people, in the rush to get on the Internet and use it, have put themselves out to such an extent that anyone with a decent knowledge of Internet usage can steal their information and take there identity and scatter to the four winds of the earth, allowing anyone and their brother to take it. But these are not even the most scary things that the Internet opens up. As more and more machines are using it and more and institutions use it for official purposes, it becomes a virtual version of real life. What does that mean? Does it mean skynet? Or the matrix? Or I,Robot? No, I do not think that any of these are realistic versions of the future. As much as I am a fan of dystopia, the real world is not always distopian.

The real world is a combination of both. I do not want to say that my experience as a person has been broad, because in all reality, it hasn't. But neither can I say that I am ignorant of the world as a whole. Life has always been moments of triumph or bliss, and moments of failure and despondence. The Internet gives voice to these things and solidifies them in time. Preserves so we can go back and look at them. So how does this make the Internet influential you ask?

It makes the Internet influential because we can remember things that are usually forgotten. The Internet captures humour, pain, despair, happiness and the mundane business of everyday life all in its servers. Whether through memes, or blogs, or facebook, twitter, tumblr, websites, clouds and all the other stuff that gives the Internet is influence. It has influence on us because it is our past. Our legacy preserved in 1's and 0's. We, as a whole race, are remembering ourselves. And this is why the Internet with its powerful influence on this next generation, will either bring human kind to the apex of its history, or take us into the blackest age we will ever know.

Choose what you remember wisely.

What is "pop culture"?

Pop culture is a shortened version of the word popular culture, meaning it is the most popular form of culture at the moment.

Pop culture has changed over the years, and as obvious as it sounds, it is a deeper change then when first looked at.

Things thay were once shunned by media and mainstream thinkers is now widely accepted as ok by everyone. Even media consumption itself has changed almost entirely. People spends lots of time on Facebook and browsing the internet. Television will still be around for a long while, but the paradigm has shifted away from one way media.

.To show how much culture has changed, let us compare two different decades. The fifties and today. Why pick the fifties? It was the decade before a lot of the stuff that happens today got is start.

In the fifties, the family paradigm was set. The wife stayed home, the kids went to school daddy worked and everyone had a suburban house. Of course this probably wasn't an accurate representation of that decade, but one can guess with TV shows at that time. Shows like leave to beaver, bonanza, little house on The prairie were on at roughly this period. What was the big threat to all this wholesomeness? Communism. That's right, Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin violent revolution, kill people who didn't agree with you communism.

"Better dead than red" was a motto back at that time. And so our portrait of that time is complete. The united states with it's fully induced judeo Christian culture was fighting a cold war against another huge super power who was basically portrayed as evil. No internet, only newspaper's and the burgeoning TV industry.

Fast toward to today. Memes, TV, the internet, texting, Facebook, Twitter and a host of other sites. Society seems almost to have a running commentary on what is happening at the moment. Political campaigns are almost still the same, with ads that are ment to evoke emotions and violent cords in our brains. In todays work, as things become more and more gray in ideals, the religions of yesterday struggle to keep up with ideas such transhimanism, cybernetics, cloning, the internet, space travel and a host of other things. Our culture seeks to polarize its self to see any kind of black and white, but there is no such luck.

Has our society lost its way? Have we gone astray? What does the future hold, tell me in the comments.