The Internet: Still a little of that Wild West feel

When you see movies set in the wild west, you always see the traveling salesman, the schister doctor, the small carnivals, and so on.  And one thing you might see as you get into more developed towns was the strange stores that would pop up.  The Internet is a lot like this currently - anything you've ever dreamed of selling, well you can do it on the Internet for relatively very low overhead as a second job.  Sort of a way of making hobbies payoff perhaps.  This is very true, and some people do it well.

And from this comes the perception that it's very easy, and then you start seeing all these commercials come out with titles like: "Make big bucks from home!!" with montages of the good life, scenes of golf while riding golf carts and supermodels, while graphics of money come floating down from the mirrored ceiling.

There are also the self perceived outlaws, who get amused by using 1337 references and defacing sites, slightly anarchistic, while at the same time riding and deriding what was provided to them for (almost) free by the very same government they suspect of using it as a tool to track them, a floating ethereal "permenant record", where everything can and will be used against you at their convenience.

There are the real outlaws, in my mind the spammers, the bot-writers and controllers, who use unsuspecting mom's and dad's computers to spread pointless advertising for pr0n and |-|0t s+0x.  Utilizing the net and it's too trusting naive protocols for their unethical if not (increasingly) illegal purpose, clogging the "tubes" so that Senator Stevens can't get emails from his aides.

There are also "the people" too, selling strange things such as wedding vow planning guides that I don't personally think I need, but apparently there exists enough people out there that this site is justified.  There are sites that specialize in harmonica lessons.  If you wanted to be your own DJ, you can get the gear.  You can search "how to be a dj" on google.  Or, increasingly in vogue with the people and eschewed by their teachers, Wikipedia.

All of these things, naturally, could not possibly exist alone in a smaller town prior to the Information Age.  To a certain extent, catalogs and smallish ads in the back of magazines might have offered a similar feel, but the right now generation can't be bothered to wait that long.  Soon enough, there won't be a necessitated seperation between the urbane and the rubes based on their respective geographic handicaps.  If the people take advantage of the opportunities to explore their interests, there exists a wealth of free information out there to educate.  I think that it is becoming increasingly important to teach our next generation how to use this vast tool - and how to seperate the schlock from the good stuff.