This whole Twitter on television thing has really forced me to realize that the internet is far more mainstream than I like to think. I have to sit around and worry in a paranoid state that at some point, some day, someone I've met in passing will Google my full name and find this website (would have been worse in the past when I used to have public journals of five years of my life) and my twitter account. Maybe one of my co-workers?

I know a kid who got suspended from middle school because a friend's mother saw that his MySpace profile listed him as gay and reported it to the school's principal. Why would it even occur to her to do that? (And there's Dooce, of course, whose amount of 'daily' stuff makes me feel like a chump.) That's one reason why I worry.

But even still, there are people who I know, the most internet prolific out of the group, who never realized that you could put a fake email address into Apple's stupid email requester when you download iTunes. I know teenagers who use LimeWire and think torrents are scary places they don't understand, and we're talking slightly autistic teenagers who tested out of high school right as they turned 16, so this kid isn't dumb, and he hasn't lacked the time to delve into the computer.

To a lot of people, it seems like the internet, hell, PCs in general, are a scary place. You wander randomly to some untested area of the waters and you may get eaten by a shark. Or maybe a grue. Or, at the very least, you get some random virus by visiting the wrong website or infested with spyware. I understand now why the majority of IT divisions exist in companies: to scare stupid people into not clicking on random shit without thinking.

And it works. The workers bring it home to their kids, when they chide their children over changing the wallpaper or fiddling with their Windows Media Player, because last time they upgraded the computer they lost all their music because, from what it sounded like to me, they imported all their CDs into some sort of DRM-protected WMA that they can't play on their new computer, so she's just pissed off all over.

It's safe to say Microsoft doesn't really help the problem either, but what can they do? The problem is ubiquity, the problem is too much choice. Apple's horribly overpriced shit, that everyone lovingly calls the "Apple tax" these days, guarantees you a few things: a controlled environment, and independent developers who are also pretentious fuck heads, so they only want to design software that achieves Apple's high level of standards. Macs are a secret world for people with no other interests (or lots of money). On PC's the idea is to shovel out as much shit as you can.

I've been sitting on the internet for the majority of my days for a much longer portion of my life so far than I'm sure most of us would admit to, and I've never gotten a virus or a spyware infection. Am I lucky? I don't know. I just don't download things from random places. I know I let my dad lose on his user account once without any virus protection installed and within 30 minutes of porn-site browsing (ah, the internet habits of a 60 year old) my computer was so fucked up I eventually had to reformat. I don't know how he did it. I wasn't watching over his shoulder or anything. Gross.

It's a relief, then, I guess, that the internet is so scary to most people. They just assume the internet is equally as scary to everyone else. As long as I continue to work with old people, I'll probably never have to worry about any of them Googling my name and reading this.

So fuck ya'll!

Actually I quite like my job, so I don't really mean that.

Song Note: You can't buy this song anywhere, apparently.