The Internet and Drama

The internet has always been a platform for many different things. It seems that it has even created a platform for drama to be integrated into every single issue.

Unlike news and other forms of general communication, things that are posted on the internet stays. One cannot remove it and it may sometimes prove difficult to repair whatever damage is done, especially since the evidence is almost completely and absolutely real.

Let's take a recent example of this "dramatisation". We have the recent issue of the Hwa Chong student and his post on Stomp. If he had expressed his opinion somewhere else, like in real life, the incident would soon be forgotten, like how words are easily eroded by the flow of time. However, he posted his opinion on the internet. These words, so real yet so virtual, are immune to the erosion of time. As long as the internet exists, someone may just dig up the issue and it would start another massive controversy.

Now you may ask, what about opinions that are spread on the media? Don't those matter? Well, of course they do. Those things do last, but how far does the news actually spread? Many countries tend to try and prevent highly controversial content from being spread through the news. It still happens, but it is much less frequent. On the internet, it takes merely twenty minutes, one hour, for a popular site to receive over nine thousand views. It barely takes anytime for the drama to start. Anyone can post something on the internet and have half the world making a big deal out of it. Not everyone gets a chance to be part of news that half the world will be watching.

An example of such a thing would be Clifford Stoll. Here's a link to his article on Newsweek.
WAIT! Didn't I just link you to a Newsweek article? What has that got to do with the internet? Well, look at the latest comments. 2010. This article dated back to 1995, but there are still people aware about this issue (the controversial comment of one man) 15 years later. What does this say? Things on the internet live. They live for a very long time. When things are active for longer than they should be (like in real life), people start making a rather big deal about things. In real life, things are the Talk of the Month. On the internet, things may very well be the Talk of the Decade. Things become more exxaggerated as their lifespan increases. Watch any long running show and you see that most become more and more ridiculous as it goes on (I'm talking about Pokemon).

Indeed, the internet is a place where information never dies. As a result, people will have all the time in the world to create a massive fuss over anything. This is not my opinion about the Stomp issue, its just a mere observance about the internet's impact on things.

One thing that I already pointed by didn't state in black and white: The Internet makes more people involved with everything.