Peeve Farm

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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

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Wednesday, January 23, 2002
17:50 - Followup on College Urban Legends http://www.grotto11.com/blog/?+1011688427	(top)
In discussion with Hiker, it came up that another reason why the college urban legends in the movie Slackers (see the link) irks people like me is that now that they've become common memes, people will already know them. They'll think the movie was where they originated. You can tell people "No, these stories date back to 1970-whatever", but they won't be interested in hearing that. These are supposed to be funny stories, after all. People don't want to be corrected when they're trying to laugh about something silly. But even more of a worry to us is the fact that when urban legends like these move into the mainstream consciousness, they cease to be "folklore"-- and believe me, there is precious little "folklore" in the world anymore. Before the Internet, seniors could tell these stories to freshmen, and the freshmen would believe that the stories are based on events that occurred at their school-- right there at home. That's how the stories would be told. Whether there's any truth to them or not, the whole point is believing that it could happen here because it did happen here. I know for sure that a lot of the legendary doings of Caltech students burrowed their way deep into me during my frosh year and instilled in me a pride in my school that surprised the hell out of me-- maybe I was so desperate to love the school after working so hard to get in that I would latch onto anything; I don't know. But if I hadn't been told those stories and felt myself become part of the legends and the history through the act of listening, I would have enjoyed my time there a whole lot less. The Internet's benefits are myriad; we all know that. But one thing that really sucks about it is that it removes the uncertainty and the mysticism from campfire stories. In 1990, if someone had told you the "Do you have any idea who I am?" story, you would take it on faith that that was how it happened, that it happened at your school, and that the version you heard was the canonical one-- and therefore anybody else's variants were derivatives that you could feel smugly superior about. But today, all you have to do is type that phrase into Google, and up pops an authoritative archive of college urban legends, complete with bibliographies, annotations, histories of revisions, and definitive origins. And that's anticlimactic as hell. See, this is what it must have been like to be the Pope listening to Galileo speak. Yeah, the bastard's right, he probably thought. But, dammit... now the world's so much less fun. Not to blast a tangent out the side of this post, but that's what religion fears most about science, I suspect: the prospect that we might know how everything works. "He knows everything." "Oh, I wouldn't like that; it'd take all the mystery out of life." So we'd all become logical, scientific thinkers with no imagination; we'd know how to reach the stars but we'd have no desire to do so. Yeah, that's it. The Internet will turn us all into Vulcans.