Internet Appreciation Day

Now that online dating is the second most common way to meet that special someone, let’s stop worrying and love the web!

Hear the news? Next to friends and family, online dating is now the second most common way to meet your mate. Now, some of you might be thinking, “Ugh! When will this insipid e-xodus into virtual non-reality stop? First we upload our libidos and sex goes cyber. Then a ‘friend’ becomes someone you accept or decline with a click. Now the wonderful mating dance is nothing but scrolling through personals and sending out pasted pleadings to likely matches. The Internet is the new opium, the world’s waiting to be asked to dance, and if we wanna really get it on we’ve gotta turn it off!”

But hold on a minute. While I’ll freely admit that it’s awfully enticing to fritter away far too much of our personal potential surfing around in a state of useless distraction, I’d like to point out that we often don’t know what something does for us until we stop obsessing over what it’s done to us. Yes, the Internet has ushered in some quite degrading, if not destructive, ways for us to blow our precious time, but to paraphrase McLuhan, the medium is a mirage. An incredibly alluring, accessible, and anonymizing mirage, but a mirage nonetheless. If you don’t look at it, but through it, you’ll see that it’s not there. It’s merely a figment of our infatuation.

And as such, it’s a wonderful thing. It’s a reference library. It’s a gaming world. It’s a community meeting. It’s a political movement. It’s a family reunion. It’s an information booth. It’s a soapbox. It’s a fan zine. It’s an art gallery. It’s a performance space. It’s an awesome singles bar. It’s a fundraising opportunity. It’s an emotional vent. It’s a personal broadcasting channel. And now, it’s the second most common way we find that most important and instinctual of all needs: love.

So I say it’s time to remove the angst over Internet usage, because too much of a good thing may be a bad thing, but it never gets to be a good thing if all you worry about is if it’s a bad thing! Let’s stop feeling guilty, and start feeling giddy, for hanging out online. Let’s realize that it’s not what you’re doing, it’s what you’re doing it for. If you’re spending 50% of your life in the cloud, stop beating yourself up and start patting yourself down: Why am I doing this? What am I getting out of this? How is this making the most of me? Because as long as you plug what’s real about yourself into what you’re doing, then what you’re doing is real, even if it’s virtual.

On February 6, 2012, the second place matchmaking status of online dating was announced. So I say we make that Internet Appreciation Day. On that day we’ll all throw out our “shoulda woulda coulda” about how much we’re on the web and toss ourselves guiltlessly into the cyber sea. We’ll revel in all the files we download, the comments we post, the blogs we read, the friends we accept, the tweets we blast, and the love letters we send to available members, and when we’re done, we’ll log off and fall into the arms of our friends and family, who, need I remind you, are still, and will probably always be, Number One.

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