People who look at porn and violent media and drugs and other illegal content online are often prone to deleting their browsing histories and knocking out the web browser’s stored cache of valuable data on a regular basis.
This may keep the local files secret, but ISPs still keep records, and the person is likely to get caught out anyways.
You may also find that your computer runs *better* with these files left in the browser history and cache, as the web browser is able to load images faster without redownloading them, and the images can be used to create work portfolios and idea webs to generate better, more immersive content for the user.
Really, what’s needed is “Red Cards” for Web 2.0 internet meme-factory edgelord sites that run constant risque content on a push system. People may find that it is impossible to avoid this type of media, and that the low-brow villainy follows them and gets injected into every site they try to escape to. If users could flag this type of content and opt out of memes gone wild once and for all, it would help with the situation. As it stands, the bad memes are everywhere and users are forced to interact with them on a one-at-a-time basis, with no guarantees that they won’t see a given post, or *style* of given post again.
It’s really sad to see what happened to the science of memetics after it was initially introduced by world-famous scientist and atheist Richard Dawkins, but I don’t know if we will ever recapture the potential of this field of knowledge, after seeing what the common media-rich marketing zeitgeists have done to try and hold the attention of the average user. None of these memes we look at daily seem to be interesting, educational, or funny; almost all of them cater to the lowest common denominator of society, and it’s extremely insulting the way they are offered and the widespread nature of their coverage. If this is what the Modern News Media continues to push as “viral”, we want nothing to do with it.
Whether this is an ISP issue, or a real world movement is a mystery, as it is possible the content is crowdsourced, or machine-generated with poor implementation of psyche-stimulating natural language processing. The number of people caught up in this fad, and working to distribute memes borders on world-ending insanity.
That’s not to say the issue can’t be resolved adequately, though; THIS POST (clicky) about copyright law and fair use is now somewhat resolved by that little “context sensetive gif” search tool available on most social media sites, like twitter and facebook. By entering a few key words, users are presented with a list of gifs to meme away to their heart’s content. It’s simply hilarious at times, and at others, when specifically referencing taboo subjects (what is taboo these days, anyway?), we find ourselves being dragged into a hellscape of highly-deletable media, that seems impossible to save to our hard drives in the first place.
If there is one general rule of thumb, it is that the OS does not want the internet to interact with anything outside the web browser, with the exception of a few trojan horse technologies like MS Paint and Smartphone Cameras. We may find one day, that if more devices are connected to our beautifully multi-talented Microsoft operating systems, and they gain widespread popularity, that there will be a shift in user generated content away from drudgery, towards more interesting outlets and forms of art, not just MS Paint memes and 6 second videos of people getting smashed in the testacles.
How .gif memes work is a very simple and intuitive process, albeit with a lot of unwanted and surprising results. You simply press the .gif button, type a topic or quote or subject, and select a .gif from the search results to add to a post:
I’ve just installed the WordPress Plugin “GiphyPress” to make a scene on the web. Ahhh, the animated .gif. Now it feels more like the internet I call home. Are you ready, internet?
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.