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Unlicensed Surreal Estate Broker
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Last Updated 7/10/2003 by dickdiamond.com 7/10/2003 The Law of Digital Mortality If you have an online presence—web site, blog, frequent usenet posting—and you don't post anything for a year, and in fact if nothing from the current year comes up in a google search on you, people will assume you're dead. There's a lot of dead wood out there. This is a necessary function of the age of the Internet. It used to be true, up until fairly recently I think, that, due to centuries of exponential population expansion, most of the people who had ever lived on the Earth were still alive, but of course that couldn't go on forever. Death always wins. And the same is now true for Internet content: more is dead, stale, rotting, rusting than is still up-to-date, fresh, alive. You can see this effect in domain names. In the heyday '90s, you could type in almost-any-string-of-characters.com and get a live, functioning web site. Now you'll get a generic placeholder page, a 404 or an offer to sell you the domain for even very common words, phrases and acronyms. Entropy's gonna get ya. Reality or Just Reallycrappy TV? I am disturbed that a few cents from my cable bill each month goes (or will go) to this and other crappy networks. Remember the good old '80s when we used to boycott things out of real principle (refusing to invest in countries that perpetrated segregation, slavery and genocide, instead of countries that make brie)? Shouldn't there be a way to push for a la carte cable pricing on moral grounds? For example, I'm offended if any of my money goes toward Fox News. I don't use the channel and I don't agree with their politics. But I'm stuck with them in my lineup because right now there is no market force to drive this crap out of the system. Even if they track ratings for channels like the reality channel and the shopping channels (admittedly a special case because of broadcast "must carry" rules), they're so miniscule as to be swallowed up by error margins. At the very least, I think we should know how much of our cable bill is going to these leaches. I mean if it's really zero or less, if they're paying the cable companies for the privilege of cluttering up the dial, I can live with that—it's like commercials: I'll find a way around it. But my fear is that every single one of these useless cable channels takes another bite, causes another rate increase, and takes away money, bandwidth, and attention from legitimate channels. There are probably 10 channels I use on a regular basis, and maybe 20 that I probably should keep "just in case," but I have to buy 200+ channels for the privilege.
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Copyright 2003 by dickdiamond.com
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