10 things the internet has slaughtered

1. Movie Stores

Long gone are the days of popping in to your local Blockbusters and buying that VHS tape or DVD that had you sorted for the night. With the boom of wireless internet from your Ming Dynasty era dial-up connection, streaming movies/shows online has never been quicker or easier. With services such as Netflix or your more illegal torrenting websites such as ‘The Piratebay’ getting that movie you’ve been longing to watch is now just a click away rather than five blocks away.

2. Encyclopaedias

Wikipedia pretty much sums this all up.

3. Sarcasm and Subtlety

Now I’m sure you’re aware that when someone on the other side of the world is communicating with you via written text, it is different from them having a face to face conversation with you whilst their body language is in full swing. I’m pretty sure everyone’s been in a situation where they simply couldn’t detect if their friend was being sarcastic or genuine. It’s always with phrases such as KK (ok cool) or that Facebook thumbs up at the end of a conversation that gets delivered to me after telling one badass story that does my head in.

4. Procrastination Control

The internet has literally killed off productivity. Obviously, you can argue that the internet is full of useful information that you can utilise for your own learning benefit, but the reality of it is that you’ll always have a billion other distractions to take you off your pursuit of knowledge. I crown YouTube and Facebook as the king and queen of world-wide procrastination. The strangely beautiful thing about YouTube is that you can go on it with the intention of watching say a one 5 minute music video but somehow end up on a ‘Kaka owns Xavi’ video.

5. The mystique of your friends’ lunch

Before the late 90’s or early 00’s if you were ever seen taking a picture of your meal before eating it, you’d probably get sent to your nearest lunatic asylum without the slightest hesitation from the local authorities. Now, we cannot go a day without seeing someone post online the meal they are about to devour, as if a stash of hash browns and bacon are the most interesting things in the world. Instragram has a lot to answer for.

6. Privacy

Quite an obvious one to be honest. With all the recent headlines regarding the NSA and the US conspiracy to spy on everyone’s online activities, the internet’s been a main factor facilitating our lack of privacy. Haven’t you noticed by now every time you go on a websites, cookies are tracking your activities online and tailoring the content you receive? Now at first this may just seem harmless, a cookie is just a text file at the end of the day, but trust me you can tell a lot about a person just by looking at their online activity.

7. Yahoo, Bing, Jeeves, ….

This should probably be under ’10 search engines Google has slaughtered,’ but for me Google is the internet and the internet is Google.

8. Trolls

When the word ‘troll’ is typed/spoken/read on the internet, it no longer refers to the great big mythical beast that used to terrorize villagers in Scandinavia. Now, it means as Urban Dictionary quite eloquently puts it, someone who, ‘posts a deliberately provocative message to a newsgroup or message board with the intention of causing maximum disruption and argument.’

9. Keeping silly questions to yourself

With the luxury of providing anonymity from other public users of the internet, the web has made the asking of some seriously dumb ass questions online a daily ritual. A quick browse of Yahoo Answers says it all really, with questions like, ‘My girlfriend got pregnant and we didn’t have sex,’ propping up daily on the homepage.

10. Polite disagreement

A quick look at any one of the many YouTube videos’ comment section would be enough to prove this. No longer can people argue with each other in a pleasant fashion. I guess being able to hide under a user name, without anyone seeing or knowing you’re the person typing the torrent of insults, lets you get away with pretty much anything really .