You know you've reached jaded status when you sit there with the world wide web at your fingertips, the greatest fountain of knowledge in history......and you are just so fucking uninterested you start playing minesweeper. It should be called 'mindsweeper,' because I have a tendency to totally go glossy eyed blank in the face while playing. I think it brings back to the forefront the unfortunate and all too common theme of man - we are apathetic bastards as a whole. Sure, there are those gleaming souls that raise us up for the briefest of moments. MLK, JFK, and all those other three named phenoms.

However, the realist in me that likes to kick the shit out of my idealist inner child on the great playgroundof debate points to one major trend that highlights the fact that man, on the cusp of greatness, knows just how to fuck things up and shoot his foot off. For every one wholesome 4th grade child you have googling 'amoeba,' you have three perverts trying to chat with him, five advertisers trying to brand him, and one school bully plastering his name all over some myspace page.

So I pose this question to you: is the world wide web really an elevation of mankind to a new level of thinking, or merely a new way of mankind's oldest and ugliest tendencies to breed and find new homes faster and farther than ever before? I lay three very common and current trends at your feet for consideration.

First, the new age spelling of some of the most common words and then the creation of on line acronyms for just about any situation. omg, i'm rofl with pain @ da thought of where we r headed. I would love to hear from America's teachers and findout just how much of their students' on line educations are carrying over into their schoolwork. I bet they see some fairly unsurprising trends.

Second and third things to consider, the world wide web opens up to everyone, and 'everyone' includes pedophiles and thieves. Between news programs highlighting on line predators and investigating Internet fraud, I wonder just who I myself have really talked to on line in the past and whether or not I examine my credit card statements close enough.

I'm not all rain clouds, though. I do understand the power of the world wide web and the value of having such volumes of information literally at your fingertips. However, to wax biblical for a second, beware of placing faith in false gods. The Internet, though seemingly invisible, is indeed a concrete invention of man and nothing a sizable power outage or faulty wireless card won't put to the ultimate test.