Viraj's Weblog

From Discover's Peer Review column:

Had Time pronounced us Person of the Year back in 1995 - before the Internet had been reduced to an electronic strip mall and market survey - it might have been daring, or even self-fulfilling. Back then, however, the magazine was busy deriding the Internet with a sensationalist and inaccurate online child pornography cover story. In the intervening years, Walt Disney and its fellow media conglomerates may have cleaned up Time Square, but now our kids are whoring themselves for attention on News Corp-owned MySpace. Corporate America is secure enough in its victory that it's now selling it back to us as a supposed shift in media power.

Yes, we are using media differently, sitting in chairs and uploading stuff instead of sitting on couches and downloading stuff. But in the end we're still glued to a tube, watching mostly crap, arguing like angry idiots, surrendering the last remains of our privacy, and paying a whole lot more to large corporations for the privilege.