The Internet
The 2003 fantasy baseball season is now officially over, with me finally winning a season. I would like to say congratulations to me on my victory, and wish my sincere condolensces to Piya for his narrow loss.
With fantasy sports on my mind all throughout this past weekend, I got to thinking about this one time when I was in my junior high or early high school years, me and my friends were so fanatical about the Bulls and the NBA that we decided to start our own fantasy basketball league. Since this was years before the Internet came along and revolutionized the world (of fantasy sports), we had to do scoring by hand, using boxscores from the Tribune. Of course, this was a huge pain in the neck and thus I don't think our league really lasted for more than a few weeks. It's still a good memory though, mostly I just remember that Mitch Richmond was awesome, and one day Kevin Johnson had 10 steals.
Anyways, now that it's 2003, computers and the Internet are considered second nature to most of us, I thought I'd note some of the other little things that a lot of us (or maybe just me) have gotten used to in the past few years, numbered but in no particular order:
1. Online Movie Listings - If you're hip, you use Fandango. If you're exceptionally cool like me, you customize your personal Yahoo! page. Either way, it saves us from having to dig through a newspaper and end up with black fingertips.
2. Driving Directions - If you're hip, you use MapQuest. If you're exceptionally cool like me, you customize your personal Yahoo! page. Neither one is 100% perfect, but both get the job done most of the time. It's one of those things that seriously make me wonder how I ever got by without it, considering how often I use it these days. A highly underrated convenience, to say the least.
3. Google - As everyone knows, search engines are a very powerful tool that can be used to research important information and gain knowledge about a broad range of topics. But for me, my favorite use of searching the Internet is to settle bets about random arguments that come up between me and certain friends. Such as, "How old is Cindy Crawford?", "Is Zach from Saved By The Bell really half-Asian?", and many more. I mean, most of that "important information" you can find in your local library, but how else can you easily find the answers to those kinds of questions? If not for the power of Google, I'm sure I would have experienced many miserable days of not having my curiosity satisfied or my hypotheses proven.
4. MP3s - I'm not someone who stopped buying CDs when it became easy to download any song you wanted for free. Actually, I probably started buying more CDs because I was exposed to more music beyond the top 40 rotation on popular radio. Anyways, I continue to buy music regularly, partly because it's my way of supporting the artists that I feel are putting out good music and deserve their share of my $13, and also because CD sound is still noticeably better than mp3 quality (at least to me). My point is, if the system wasn't abused to the point where musicians and record companies actually have a right to be mad, mp3s could actually be a really good thing overall. I think I wrote more in depth about this in a earlier blog so I'll leave it at that for now.
So basically, let me sum up the point of this blog. While the Internet has been hailed as a revolution that brings the world closer and forever changes the way people communicate and share information, I see it mainly as a source of free music and useless trivia. And of all the grand uses and conveniences that the Internet might have to offer, the only ones that matter to me are getting quick driving directions and local movie listings. Oh yeah, fantasy sports too.
Either I'm an ignorant fool, or technology still has a ways to go before we can really consider the Internet "revolutionary".
