What Do I Know? The Internet Junkie

As I understand it, there are two basic types of Internet junkies, the newsie and the reality based. The newsie lurks in chat rooms and news groups, something I was shocked to learn has nothing actually to do with news, but is more like the Yiddish "Nu?" which is a perfunctory greeting which can sometimes result in a lot more than you want to know (fortunately, it is most often met with "don't ask.") Shmooze rooms. I would imagine there are insurance newsies, Hummel newsies, Ducks Unlimited newsies--just about anything your little keyboard desires. They are people with either a genuine or an ingenuine interest, others who are probably lying to them as well, drawn from a pool of similarly inclined "netizens," that creepy word that turns up on web pages and makes you think of "The Children of the Damned" with their laser blue eyes (an option on Windows 98).

The reality based tends to be a "tekkie" or someone who leans in that direction such as myself, wasting an increasing number of hours as I am watching little blue byte-meters grow on 13 MB browser downloads and rogue programs which, when you uninstall them, cleft your IBM clone. Right now, for example, I take no little pride in just about having reassembled my hard drive to where it was on that fateful night in February when I tried to get some MPEG3 pirate program of the month off of it, not realizing that it had spread into its very nervous system like in "Body Snatchers." You know the feeling when you find out your folders have been overwritten by another. No? Well, I never thought I would, either. I felt, I don't know, violated. I'm beginning to resemble the much dreaded basement CB operator, or the guy monitoring police calls in his boxer shorts, except that either of them could conceivably do some good.

I do find the Net useful for news news (you remember news: that stuff that happens to people who aren't plugged in) and have even been throwing caution and MasterCard to the wind by increasingly buying over what I'm sure must be secure servers (or I wouldn't be doing it, would I?). I try to stay off the sexual sites, in case I want to run for office some day, or more likely, receive a nomination for the High Court. But chat rooms, no. If I wanted to know what was happening to anonymous individuals, I'd strike up more conversations on the bus.