There are many fantastic and creative things out there on the Internet. Content created by individuals or groups that transcend Internet camp and show of some serious artistic merit. Without the Internet most of these people would never have found any larger audience than their friends and family. The Internet also offer established artists and writers a new avenue of distribution.
Check out Stefan G. Bucher's little daily project he's got going. Amazing stuff.
Then there's the horribly bad side of the Internet. Beside the obviously disgusting stuff like neonazi fumblefucks getting a channel to express themselves in (which they should be allowed by the way) and child pornography we have all the really shitty user created material on youtube. And myspace, and flickr, and all the God damn everyday blogs. Don't get me wrong, there's heaps of awesome stuff there as well. Just that it's outweighed by a ratio of something like 1000:1 or more. But worst of all is the corporate incursions and failed attempts to create "buzz" or "viral marketing" campaigns. Viral marketing can be both entertaining for the consumer and effective for the company but it has to be subtle. So that even if the users finally realize that it's marketing, which is sort of a necessity, they don't feel tricked and get pissed off.
Here's Sony's feeble and quite frankly insulting attempt to sell a shitty product.
Nobody wants a PSP for Christmas, that's the main problem in selling this illusion. The second one being that you need to engage the user (or audience if you will) in some sort of activity. Let me rephrase that. You need them to think. Who created this? Is it real? What in the shit is going on? It's this interest that makes them "buzz" about it and pass it along, thus triggering a viral effect. For them to just visit some blog about a fan-boy and his fancy of a handheld device no one really likes is just....sad.
Why is it that huge
corporate influence on anything only makes it worse and spoils the fun for all the rest of us? Granted comments are usually so mind-numbingly stupid it makes my little eyes sad, but I don't want someone censuring bad language. And certainly not someone besides the creator of the content.