Can you imagine life (now) without the Internet? I can’t. I seriously can’t.

And even if you say, ‘yeah I could live without it’, I wouldn’t believe you. When I say no Internet, I mean NO Internet. And maybe you don’t realise just how much of your every day life that would impact; no Google searching, no maps usage on your mobile, no social media, no apps downloads… Life would be very different. How’s your physical research skills? When was the last time you went to a library? Snail mail?

Yeah. Didn’t think so.

I had a friend stay with me recently. He’s a pilot in the Defence Force and is currently stationed out of Tamworth in northern NSW. He stays with me once a month, and we go out and do ‘city-stuff’ – the kind of ‘stuff’ that can’t be done or experienced in Tamworth (if you’ve been to Tamworth, you’d know exactly what I mean). For the purposes of this blog, and those to come (no doubt he’ll feature) – we’ll call him Mr Pilot.

When he came for his January visit, he explained to me that one of his goals for 2013 (I hate using the world ‘resolution’ – I really feel it’s been over-used, and not in a positive way) was to embrace social media further. Now, you may think Mr Pilot is mad for making this something he wants to focus on – but he never uses it. Never. And he is literally isolated in Tamworth. And I mean, stranded. That place is almost void of the things we take for granted in major cities (sorry Tamworth folk), and most of his (normal) friends (by normal I mean not in the Defence Force) are in more urbanised locations, like Sydney for example.

Therefore during his February visit, I asked him how the whole increasing his use of social media thing was going. He responded that it was kind of difficult to achieve because he doesn’t have the Internet connected at home. UMmmm, excuse me, Mr Pilot – I don’t think I heard you quite right?

So, this got me thinking. How does one live without the Internet (even at home)?

And then my thought patterns moved one step further – how does one live without the things that drive the Internet; like porn and hilarious cat photos / videos? Basically – how does one live without being wired into constant pussy?

How Porn Revolutionised the Internet?

Do you know when the first version of the Internet was launched?

• Research on how the Internet could ‘come about’ (yes, I am bastardising this for all you nerds out there. But hey – bastardisation makes it more readily enjoyable for the larger community, right?) began in the 1960′s. Wouldn’t have thought that would you?
• After this research had some runs on the board, the first two ‘formats’ of the Internet were launched in the late 1960′s and early 1970′s.
• The Internet as we know it (for now), we saw the first glimpses of between 1989 and 1991, as it was further commercialised and launched into Asia and Australia.

So, When Did Porn Start Being Accessible on the Internet?

Obviously the ‘Internet’ released in the 60′s/late 70′s was not that user friendly. Let’s call it super clunky. However, as we neared the 80′s, it started to become slightly useful (whilst still being incredibly clunky). And, porn was first available on the Internet at this time, the 1980′s.

However, the full extent of what it would start to offer the online world was discovered at the time of the availability of widespread public access to the World Wide Web (WWW.) in 1991.

And in 1994, the first ‘porn’ focused website was launched.

SEX.COM
This first porn website was surprisingly named, Sex.Com - very original indeed. And, within a year it was getting on average 25 million hits per day. That's a lotta' people seeking out porn online, especially when you think about how many people worldwide would have had access to the Internet in 1995.

Happy men and women (yes, that’s right – women – they just pretend they don’t like it) celebrated world wide. No more dirty mags or novels that need to be hidden from children, or embarrassing moments at video stores when hiring ‘White Man Can Hump’. Those days were over.

Amen to the Internet! Man’s finest creation!

What Has Porn Added to the Internet? Ie. Revolutionised

By some (and I believe most), porn is regarded to be the driving force behing the expansion of the 1991 version of the Internet.

Why?

(Note: I had a previous version of this section. I decided to take a break and sit down to dinner and a glass of red. When I came back and re-read, I realised just how strong my inner-nerd was. It was totally b.o.r.i.n.g. Therefore, the below is edited. All I can say is – you’re welcome!)

Porn images and videos are normally (or so you would hope) high quality – or in those days, a higher quality of image to the other images on the net. For the bandwidth required to load these images and later video for porn sites, a higher level of ‘Internet’ was needed. Yes, that’s right. The Internet had to evolve (in a large *wink* part) in order to service the porn industry and the mass users who were ensuring the demand.

This didn’t just mean an upgrade in the Internet and bandwidth, but also the computers we were using.

We owe the porn industry a lot – and more than just for providing content to “satisfy” the masses worldwide.

So…

The long and short of it was (again, I’m *winking*) – prior to porn being MASSIVE on the net, the Internet was mainly used as an academic and military network tool, both whom clearly did not need the graphics capabilities as later were demanded by porn sites and users.

With the evolution in computers and therefore the Internet network to meet such demand (driven primarily by the porn industry) – further capabilities were enabled. These not only opened up greater graphics for the porn industry, but for other great things that we now love and take for granted online.

What Do Cats Have to Do With This?

(Other than the obvious…)

Well… if porn drove the Internet in the 90′s – cats (and I mean meowing cats here, not pussy) are driving the Internet of the 2000′s. The cat phenomena is absolutely crazy. Like Lolcats cwazy. (And, if you don’t know what a Lolcat is, you clearly are not one to jump into the memes driving online pop culture. I’ll let you Google that one on your own).

While non-online cat memes date back to the 1970′s – I’m sure you all remember the ‘Hang In There’ kitty motivational poster, which sported a small kitten hanging / dangling from a tree (I still don’t get how the hell this is motivational, but anyway) – the first online cat meme was in 2002 with CatBread. This was followed by Stalker Cat (2003) and then Ceiling Fan Cat (2006).

These sparked an array of images, videos and gifs of:

• Cats in the shape of break
• Cats stalking things
• Cats hanging from fans

All pretty complex stuff! And I can’t write this blog without mentioning my favourite cat meme first spotted in 2012 – Cat Breading Ahhh crazy cat people!

How Cats Are Shaping The Internet

Despite my best efforts, there’s no available data on just how many cat videos are uploaded to YouTube per day. But let’s put it this way – seems as though cat videos have the highest average views across all videos uploaded to the site, I’d say there’s a lot.

Memes come and go: from flash mobs, to the OHMAGERRD girl and now the Harlem Shake (man, this one kills me!) – cat memes don’t seem to be budging from our online worlds.

As the guy who created the god-awful Nyan cat clip, Chris Torres stated:

"Cats have shaped a massive Internet culture based on nothing but images and videos of cats playing pianos, jumping in boxes, riding invisible bikes, taking naps, or breaking your furniture. I think cats are easily relatable to people due to how quirky and expressive they are, and any cat-related media seems to keep the attention of even the fastest-browsing Internet viewer."

Is Life Then – Just About Pussy?

Hey, for the purposes of good humour, I’m going to say Yes!. And, well if life isn’t about ‘pussy’ – it definitely does seem that the Internet certainly is.

I truly believe that the cat meme craze is not going away anytime soon, and hell – porn’s definitely here to stay too.

So… it seems the Internet is a safe haven for cat-aholics, and people who like porn. You do the math on that combination.

And, as for my Mr Pilot friend in the Defence Force – buddy, not sure what you’re doing – you’re missing out on cats playing pianos and stuck in boxes… (now that’s just way too crude to miss out on).

—–

Signing out, in love of all things social,

Brie Parker x

I’m going to start this blog post in reverse by first writing about an anecdote and then exploring the topic a little further.

I tried to start writing this article on Monday – but who the hell was I kidding? After a long weekend, the poor brain cells really weren’t up for it. So, we’ll see how we go today with atleast 30% of my brain back and further building as I type…

(and once again, I digress).

Setting The Scene

Ok, so basically I facilitated a round table at a marketing conference late last year. The topic was on social media and risk management; how corporate Australia need to embrace social media and manage risk effectively. And this wasn’t a particularly easy task given the fact that the people in the room were all (almost) double my age and were at the marketing helms of some of the top 100 businesses in Australia (I’m not even exaggerating).

Managing the round table topic, and talking / advising these C-level marketing execs on social media made my age, or the age gap between us – so very apparent. (And, I don’t think my bright pink hair helped).

It didn’t take long for the conversation to move onto why a brand’s social media should not be managed by the ’20 something’ in the office – which obviously lead the conversation to me explaining that I am a ’20 something’ and responsible for a lot of big brands and their social voices.

Bottom-line: It’s not ‘just’ about age – it’s about the maturity of the person managing the social media, their level of responsibility and their knowledge of your business.

What’s My Age Got To Do With It?

Dinner was right after this round table, and the way that these conferences normally work at “shared eating” times is that you split up from your colleagues in order to more effectively network.

And, ofcourse – I sat on a table of (older) men, most of whom had been in this round table. And, ofcourse – I was the only female on this table. This didn’t particularly bother me (at all), but given my age and career had been a bit of the discussion point for the previous hour during the round table, I was a little more vulnerable than my normal confident self.

The dinner topic moved to social media and therefore naturally – focused on my opinion. And, it then moved to trolls and what this now means for us as users of social networks, businesses and (in my opinion, more importantly) – children and teenagers.

I gave my opinion (as I often do). And the short version of my thoughts on the topic of trolls is this:

• It’s a real issue and one not to be taken lightly
• I think that young people are growing up in hard and scary times where bullying no longer necessarily has a face, but a keyboard (and massive anonymity) to be able to hide behind
• While cyberbullying is never OK, I do think celebrities should be more prepared to deal with criticism they may receive from social media trolls, just like they do everyday in the press or even walking down the street
• BUT, celebrity ‘troll’ press does allow for further focus to be placed on the topic, and hence more support can be provided for young people who really need it.

After sharing the above (and trust me – that is the short version in comparison) – one of the men at the table shared his own anecdote of being a ‘social media troll’, which he indicated was ‘super hilarious’.

And it was his story that made me feel very young, yet very mature at the same time.

‘His’ Social Media Troll Story

**insert really bloke-y, Aussie voice. But note, he was definitely educated, so it’s not a slight on his intellect at all.**

(I’m a bogan too)

During the 2000 Sydney Olympics, blogs and forum sites were all the rage. Now these were the 'social networks' of the late 90's and early 2000's.

Me and ma' mates were contributors to quite a few sporting forums, we just got on there ye'know and riled some feathers by pushing some buttons with our sporting opinions. We mostly did it for the crack.

There was one particular thread that was on the Olympics, and someone had made the comment that Aussie's were all cheaters and they wanted to burn the Australian flag. This dick was just jealous of all the medals we'd won, or so we thought. And we obviously really hated his threatening to burn our flag - found it fuckin' (yes, he swore) insulting.

So we went to harassing this guy via the forum. Got all our mates together; like 20 of us, and we set to messaging him continuously calling him all the names under the sun, even threatening to hunt him down and break his legs. (laughs)

We then decided it would be funny to track down his email address and move our abuse from the forum to contacting him directly. Being pretty good at IT and rooting around for that kinda stuff, we had no probs finding this out. And we realised he was a Yank - well this just got us 'going' even more.

And here's the funny thing, this went on for a further 2 weeks before each of us (me and me 20 mates), received emails from the CIA reprimanding us and sayin' if we didn't stop contacting this particular bloke, we'd be charged.

Turns out he was a professor from some swanky US University doing research on patriotism in sport and he was using forum discussions to test his theories on how quickly it can turn bad. 

Boy, did we help his research hey - hilarious!

My Opinion (again) On This

So while everyone at the table were laughing (to be fair, some awkwardly) – I wasn’t. I was totally perplexed.

Like. Totally.

What was funny about this? Why could he not display tolerance for this stupid comment about burning the Australian flag and keep his reactions clean and constructive? Or hey, how about he just ignored it?

I decided to ask him (ofcourse):

• ‘Why would you do that?’
• He replied: ‘What do you mean?’
• Me: ‘Why would you take your patriotic anger to such a level and to such an extent to contact someone directly and threaten their life?
• Him: ‘He wanted to burn our Aussie flag, you don’t say that. And, it was a bit of fun.’
• Me: ‘But don’t you think your behaviour is the very behaviour that is sparking this trolling on social networks? Isn’t bullying, bullying despite what ignited your particular fury?’

Needless to say, the conversation stopped here.

And I was shocked that at my “age”, (to which had been such a big discussion point for the past 2 days) I could understand the issue here with his behaviour, and he – couldn’t.

And it was then that my belief of ‘age is just a number’ was further cemented.

Trolling: Explored

Mid to late last year (2012) social media trolls and the act of ‘trolling’ via social networks was brought further into the light by the Australian media. Predominately because of some high profile, celebrity trolling incidents:

• Charlotte Dawson: attempting to take her life after being bullied via Twitter.
• Robbie Farah: (Australian NRL footballer) contacting police after receiving abusive tweets in relation to the death of his mother.

These celeb cases were perfect for bringing the issue of trolling further into focus.

Trolling is such an important issue in our current environment. More so for children and young adults, as growing up with social media is making life so much more complex. We hear about it everyday on the news worldwide of how cyberbullying, faceless anger via Facebook, Twitter (you name it!) is taking the lives of young, innocent people.

But I can’t lie. The celebrity thing does confuse me.

And it’s not that I’m heartless or I’m questioning their sadness or fragility. But don’t they deal with criticism everyday? Isn’t this part of being in the spotlight? And wouldn’t you deal with it the same way you deal with every other criticism you receive when classed as a celebrity?

My Point…

I suppose what my point is in all of this is that social media trolling and cyberbullying isn’t cool.

I think it’s something that we should definitely campaign against, build awareness for and provide support for and to young people growing up in the technically advanced world we now exist in. They certainly face different challenges as kids than (even) I did, and I’m Gen-Y. And the fact that we now share more information than we ever have via social networks, doesn’t help either in our plight to police and protect these same young minds.

The celebrity ‘thing’ and their cases of being trolled, despite my confusion – is a good way for this issue to be further driven in the fight to somehow protect our young people online.

And… as for that particular gentleman I met, and his social media troll story – I think that simply proves that it doesn’t matter what age you are, sometimes everyone (and anyone) can be a down right dumb arse.

—

Signing out, in love of all things social,

Brie Parker x

I without a doubt, am. My friends have coined my often too much information sharing as ‘verbal porn’. This basically just explains the scenario where something happens to me, and I explain it; bit-by-bit to the tiniest, funniest, most embarrassing detail (yes my friends, you know this to be true). Why? Because sometimes things happen that are just way too good to NOT share.

However, this is just me as a person in my everyday communication. And I’m a communicator – if you know me or have anything to do with me, you’ll generally know most of what is going on in my life, running through my head or even my most recent thought. It’s just how I rollz.

But moving forward to how we as a community / world / organism are now communicating in terms of sharing content is being greatly influenced by social media. Social is changing the way we communicate and inpart information in regards to our lives and others. And, not just this – but the way we think.

People are starting to think in Facebook status updates, Twitter Tweets, (often staged) Instagram images, #Hashtags (etc). And we’re starting to share with our social network friends more information than we ever did in everyday life.

And it makes you (probably more me as I’m obsessed with this stuff) think – how good is it that we are now becoming over-sharers? Or is it just plain scary?

The Research

So the emergence of our ‘over-sharing’ on social networks sparked the interest of Harvard researchers – who decided to investigate the topic further.

The most interesting outcome (in my opinion) of the study performed by the Harvard Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab (May, 2012) was that: over-sharing on social networks is just like sex – IT’S JUST SO REWARDING.

Damn straight it is! No?

People just feel really good when sharing information about themselves. It’s pleasurable, just like having sexual intercourse:

• STAT: 80% of the average user’s social media posts (as well as 30-40% this same average person’s speech output per day) consists of self-disclosure. Basically, we’re convinced on (or just simply love) talking about ourselves.
  - Additional research found that 88% of those in the study wished that others thought more about how people perceive them when they were sharing information online. (hmmm).

• BRAIN: Talking about yourself engages two areas of the brain associated with reward. These include the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) and the ventral tegmental area (VTA). The way our brain engages with these areas when we talk about ourselves creates a feeling or reaction that just doesn’t happen when we talk about other subjects (other than ourselves).
• MORE Brain: Looking into these two brainy parts (the NAcc and VTA), I found that these areas are ones associated with concepts of reward, pleasure and addiction.
  - The NAcc is considered an important part in terms of how we process pleasurable activities like sex, junk food etc.
  - The VTA is also linked to reward and pleasurable feelings – like the way we feel when we fall in love. So basically, sharing information on ourselves is like having amazing sex while eating Lindt Almond Dark Chocolate or an amazing sandwich (atleast, that would be my ideal situation).

• AUDIENCE: The next part of the research looked at whether an audience is an important component of this reward / sex-like feeling we get when we are sharing (or rather over-sharing) on social networks. Pretty sure no-one is surprised by this outcome – HAVING AN AUDIENCE IS AN IMPORTANT PART OF THE PLEASURE WE RECEIVE FROM OVER-SHARING.
  - ‘Mental reward activity comes with the knowledge that someone they know is receiving the information being given, compared with sending information out into a void.’
  - ‘I think it helps explain why Twitter exists and why Facebook is so popular, because people enjoy sharing information about each other.’

Without a doubt, and basically the source of over-sharing – ‘The Internet has drastically expanded the number of mediums through which we can talk about ourselves to other people.’

My Experience with ‘Over-Sharers’ (+ myself)

So living in this TMI (Too. Much. Information.) era has now created (for us all) some interesting information sharing situations. I for one, a true over-sharer from way back when – probably often shares too much info on a day-to-day basis; verbally, via social networks, skype, text, email – you name it!

But I do start to think about what I’m sharing, its effects on my life (or what Facebook Friends I have that I know will judge me on the info being shared), how it could impact my career (clients do follow me on Instagram and Twitter) etc…

So while I’m thinking about these things (sometimes) – I often wonder if other people do? Because some of the stuff I have seen lately is amazingly hilarious, scary-ingly TMI, or just plain wrong.

Examples:

The guy who lives in my apartment building

… recently broke up with his boyfriend. A seemingly normal part of life, and ofcourse one that often impacts our social media (especially Facebook with the whole ‘in a relationship’ stuff).

But the way he dealt with it was somewhat… awkward. He didn’t just change his status from ‘in a relationship’ to ‘single’ – but instead shared (a very lengthy) Facebook status update with all his Facebook Friends on what had happened / the demise of his relationship to the most finite detail.

Not only did he do this on his PERSONAL Facebook Page, but he then went and posted (a version of) this on our apartment block GROUP PAGE. WTF?

While I did have a WTF moment with this, I also found it incredibly humorous. As he is not a ‘close’ friend of mine – I found it belly-achingly funny. And the thing that ran through my mind the most was that I really did not give a flying fuck about what happened.

This information covered that they were splitting up amicably, were still friends, that they hoped everyone would continue to treat them the same, they had just ‘fallen out of love’ and that they hoped they would both be supported through these ‘trying times’. Hilarious reading. (*nasty bitch*)

No doubt people often think this about the stuff I share too, but hey – everyone’s a critic, right?

The guy who I used to bartend with (our friendship now exists on social)

… is someone I follow on Instagram. He shares interesting photos, and it’s always nice to have a slice of someone’s life in image format (by this I mean, I like to stalk people on as many social networks that I can; and I don’t even care that I’m not discrete about it).

So he recently took a photo of an older man on a bus he was traveling on (from Sydney CBD back to whatever nook he lives in). This man (as stated above) was elderly and looked to be asleep. However the caption was – LOOKS LIKE THIS MAN HAS PASSED AWAY ON THE BUS.

Now, I’m getting that this is supposed to be funny. Totally. Got it.

… but, it’s actually just not that funny. All I thought was – what if he is ACTUALLY dead? *sad face*

And then there’s me

… So I thought the below was funny at the time of posting it. I was 7 beers in and with a very close friend who (obviously) encouraged me to post this particular update. It was from her mouth these words came, and it made us both just lose it in fits of laughter.