Meeting People Is Easy

Tag - the internet

By Jillian Mapes

Monday 2013-02-18, 5:00pm

It takes both courage and foolishness to meet someone you’ve only ever known as a voice or a screen name, to walk up to someone who just drove 500 miles and kiss him on the lips in a restaurant parking lot while the friends you brought for safety watch. But what takes even more chutzpah is meeting someone from the internet while having a nagging feeling that he or she is not quite telling the truth—which is almost always the case on the MTV series Catfish.

What Ted Didn’t Say

By Andy Hutchins

Thursday 2013-01-17, 12:00am

On December 29, the Twitter account @itsrealTED tweeted, “I’m pretty sure that if Walt Disney watched Disney Channel today, he would cry.” Never mind that Disney died in 1966, 17 years before his eponymous channel was launched in 1983: that truism is worthless in isolation, except for the nearly 1,000 retweets and nearly 400 favorites it’s received. Stack those gaudy stats next to those racked up by other messages sent from @itsrealTED and hundreds of other popular parody Twitter accounts, though, and a clearer, if seedier, picture emerges.

Facebook Is The Greatest Web Site In The History Of The Internet

By Kevin Fanning

Thursday 2013-01-10, 12:03am

The internet was a pretty magical place to find yourself in the late ’90s and early ’00s. So many people did so many weird and creative things as they explored this new medium, trying to figure out what it was, trying to determine what it would be. It was like a speakeasy, or a door under the stairs that led to an entirely other world. For many people it was scary, an unknown thing they were happy to not understand. But for a certain set of people, it was a new home.