Kinda Exactly How I Feel About Websurfing

"What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it."-- Warhol

I hate the fact that I'm posting an Andy Warhol quote, but regardless, studying for my 1960's to Contemporary Art Survey class, I ran into this quote and have been thinking it over quite a bit. Now, of course, the bum on the corner (actually quite literally if you know where I live) probably doesn't visit the same sites I do, or, scratch that, even really cares/utilizes the internet, the fact that I (the cultural and out of context bum) can see Fred Durst's xanga or access and use the same reading material as Hollywood execs and Pixarfolk read, it's a little strange. As the internet's growing more and more, the personal pool of information and knowledge that was once exclusive can be absorbed by anybody, anybody, who cares to read-- and it's growing. Just the fact that I, if I wanted to, can visit these terrorist (dun!) websites with decapitation videos, that twenty years ago would be type of things you would only read & whisper about in newspapers, that I can actually go and see and participate in it the exact same way as they (they!! dun dun) do, is a little bewildering. As Dustin Hoffman illustrated with his infinite blanket in I Heart Huckabees, it's all connected (and/or the same?). George W. Bush knows it, Fred Durst knows it, Osama Bin Laden knows it, and you know it. Then I think, blogging is the perfect reaction to this. How natural is it to assert your own individuality in the face of all this chaotic sameness and everythingness that is the internet? It's almost a kind of knee-jerk reflex, almost inevitable. Who wouldn't want to claim individuality and personalize and link to the bizzarre? And, ironically, it all just becomes one blog that compromise one of the insurmountable and incomprehensible many, littering livejournals, xangas, blogspots, etc. everywhere. All unsettingly natural, the "one in the many."

Hmm. Well, too bad I dropped my Globalization class two days ago (har har har).