Does God exist on the internet? I see this place as something inane, superfluous, and largely self-indulgent. There are some very useful things on the internet, but to get to them, one generally must sift through a putrid swill of pornography, cats with deplorable grammatical skills, and a mishmash of sites created by people who think they’re more intelligent than they actually are. While I can accept that God floats around at frat parties muscling His way into conversations so creatively that no one even realizes he’s there, and I can see God collapsing under a copse of trees in Sudan and watching a photographer taking shots of a dying child being stalked by a buzzard, and I can see God flickering around in my English lectures and on the street corners where some of us work and in the gutters where some of us sleep and in the coffee shops where some of us shell out $7 for a frappuccino, I turn on my computer and God disappears.
Does God have a use for the internet? Does he go on 4chan* at 2am and shake his head at the creators of the infamous 2 girls 1 cup video? Does he leave spiritual hooks embedded in the coding for weight-loss pop-up ads? Trying to imagine God on the internet feels like sacrilege. And also pointless. Surely God has better things to do. But at a time where so many people live out their lives floating around cyberspace, posting pictures of themselves on facebook, writing cruel comments on rating sites, watching youtube videos, creating disturbing internet memes, trying to level-up on world of warcraft, surely God must be out there somewhere too...
* 4chan: ‘the asshole of the internet’. When you come across something particularly heinous, and you wonder how on earth this depravity made its way onto the internet in the first place, the answer is always 4chan.
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