Why the 'Golden Age of the Internet' Has Already Passed...

I write this post in frustration.

I see adverts on TV telling me how awesome the next generation of Internet browsers will be and online its easy to find sites where you can legally watch and download TV shows, movies and music. Finally, you have the wonders of Steam and Origin that let you download and play games without having to go through all that trouble of leaving your house. To someone who is new to the Internet it seems like a wonderful, fun filled place.

Except its not.

I'm not going to pretend things were better when you had to 'dial up' to get access to the Internet; obviously it has come forward leaps and bounds since then. But what I am going to say is that the Internet was an awesome place only 5 or so years ago. Why? Well, I'll tell you:

1) Games Didn't Rely On the Internet (as much)

This seems like a strange one. Online gaming was just as popular a few years ago as it is now and if you bought a game, chances are it still needed to connect to the Internet to activate. So what has changed?

Well, now it is very easy and appealing to buy a game online because you can just click on a 'Download' button, pay for the game and have it downloading straight away. At first glance, this appears to be far quicker. I can tell you, it most definitely is not.

Whereas before you could just download the game from the CD and then activate it (which took a maximum of 15-20 minutes) now you have to do one of the following:

- Download Steam or Origin (10-30 minutes)
- Download the game (Steam seems to take anywhere between 24 to 48 hours to do this, Origin takes about 6-12 hours)
- Activate it
- Update it (anywhere between 30 mins to 12 hours)

Or, if you have bought the game:

- Upload the game from the CD (15-30 mins)
- Download Origin or Steam (10-30 minutes)
- Activate the game
- Update the game (30 mins to 12 hours)

Now, I know some people have super-fast Internet that may reduce these times, but I have a good, standard Internet connection and these are the speeds I look at. You see, its got less to do with the speed of your Internet and more to do with the servers available to you. In the UK, we have only a couple to choose from, and all of them are painfully slow.

Not only this, but in order to get these games in the first place, you have to sign up to any number of services and clients in order to get the damn things in the first place. Each game company seems to have a preferred client and each one requires a number of personal details before you can use the service.

But the altogether worst thing about these clients that allow you to download games is that they're putting game shops out of business. As such, it is not as easy as it once was to go out and buy the CD, you now either have to order the game from Amazon or Play.com (and wait for it to be delivered) or download it. It's hard to judge which option is quicker.

It is important to note that I recognise that some games are simply too large to fit onto a CD and that is why we download them online. But why, oh why, do the companies providing these games not improve their server speeds to accommodate for this?

This game now takes 2 days to download. Fact.

This leads me onto the next problem:

2) We Don't Actually Own Anything Anymore

Here is my second gripe. You spend half your life downloading the game or movie or music and then its available to you. There's a problem with this though. You may have paid a lot of money for these services but they don't actually belong to you. Many of these sites have terms and conditions that basically tell you that you don't own the products and that the service can be revoked at any time. In turn, even if you do own the product, if that company goes bust and their servers go down then you can no longer play the game.

For music, iTunes pesters you every time you switch computers (often telling you that you have a limited number of computers you're allowed to authorise) and despite paying for the music, you can't give it to other people to listen to.

In the gaming world, if you switch to a new PC then you will have to go through the ridiculous download times all over again. Oh, and if you own the CD, you have to find ways to 'trick' your computer in order to download from the CD and not from the painfully slow gaming servers that are set as a default download. Bear in mind too, that each time you're downloading for these ridiculous time periods, you will barely be able to use your Internet for anything else.

I still have games from pre-2000 that I play on a regular basis and I have to thank my lucky stars that these were produced before the Internet really took off or I would not be able to even access them now. Truly depressing.

In some ways, it is worse with movies. You download them and you 'rent' them for a period of time and then they are taken off you. Often, finding a site that even allows you to properly download a full film is difficult (and companies often try to trick you into downloading something that is not the actual film) and as a result, piracy has become a serious problem... because the simple fact is it is far easier and quicker to illegally download a film than it is to buy the damn thing.

In real life 'The Matrix' would have terrible lag. Everything would be bullet-time

3) You Better Have a Big Hard Drive

Gaming is always likely to take lots of space, though having an option to run smaller games from CD would be nice, however for things like music and films, you don't have any choice but to fill your hard drive with some of these massive files. If you try to move them to CD, the format won't be recognised or won't play. It is a massive pain in the dick to even get your music back onto iTunes in the event that your computer goes down. The only way to do it without causing a migraine is to move the music from a folder in your iPod and fiddling around with a number of settings before the computer can import it into your iTunes library.

Like I said, a pain in the dick.

4) Companies Own EVERYTHING

I remember a time when Youtube videos streamed within seconds. Now, they've improved the quality of them, but as a result you have to wait a seemingly ridiculous length of time to actually watch the full video. This can mean you have to watch the video in 'bits' whilst the damn thing buffers. It actually reminds me of how things used to be with dial-up Internet.

Of course, this loading time is assuming that you haven't already had to sit through an advertisement for something completely unrelated to your video. The least they could do is develop a way for the video to buffer whilst they are forcing you to watch their tripe. I hate the fact that advertisements load 10 times quicker than my actual video, regardless of the length.

The other problems with companies owning everything is that you're spied on all the time. I've been on forums before and had some random advertisement pop up telling me that I can meet some beautiful girl in my local area. It then shows some tanned, blonde girl sitting in front of a palm tree with the announcement "Hi, I'm Chelsea, 23 from Stoke-on-Trent."

Bullshit. Show me a fat tart stuffing her face with oatcakes and I'll believe you.

I remember the days when the worst advertisements were pop ups. Nowadays, you have all manner of crap to sift through when you're surfing the net. You have the aforementioned ones that spy on you, you have the ones that pretend to be something they're not (Click here to download!) and you have the ones that try to get you to fill in surveys or that fill your screen and make you wait 10 seconds before bypassing them.

I hate advertisements and a few years ago, there was a lot less of them.

Ahh, the good old days.

5) Everything is Blocked

A few years ago, the Internet was a lawless place. This was not always a good thing, but in a weird way, it kind of governed itself. Many people who downloaded illegally did so out of desperation and some would only download to 'taste' the product before going out and spending hard cash on it.

In fairness, downloading illegally did do good things for the entertainment industry as it forced the greedy companies to reduce their prices to a more realistic level. Prior to online downloads, I remember CD's going on sale for between £15 and £30. A ridiculous amount of money for 12 songs, and hardly any of that profit went to the artists. Now, thanks to illegal downloads, you can pick up music CD's relatively cheaply.

Obviously, this 'lawlessness' had to come to an end and whilst some of it had to happen to adhere to the law, much of it is just taking things too far. Multiple download sites have been shut down due to 'copyright infringement' making it ridiculously hard to get even legitimate downloads of obscure TV shows or films. In turn, sites like Youtube blocked any videos that were deemed to breach copyright or any number of other random laws.

The worst thing about this is that in blocking the most well-known sources of entertainment, they are simply driving people to go to the truly dodgy sites that operate with absolutely no regard for the law. It seems far easier to block something than it is to create a new service to fill the much-needed void. It is also hard to see where this will end, with sites like Wikipedia being called into question due to the way their information is displayed and linked to other sites.

I genuinely believe that the golden age of the Internet has passed. Soon, we will be looking at a strictly-enforced place which kills high street stores, is painfully slow, is in your face and is strictly monitored to prevent you from getting anything for free. Indeed, I believe that everything which makes the Internet great may soon be in jeopardy.

... And this fucking game is still only at 89% after almost 30 hours of downloading.

Why Look Forward When We Can Look Back?

How bad is it that we now have to look back to the past to enjoy the present? Recently, advertisers and companies have realised just how crap the present is and are beginning a revival of their past commercialt to try and usher in new profits without having to spend any effort thinking up new ways of grabbing our attention.

But there's a problem with this, because in our nanny culture present time many past adverts may be seen as a little too 'misleading' or 'cruel' to have on our modern boxes. A good example is the recent revival of the old Milky Way commercial which involves two cartoon cars racing each other. To the untrained eye, the new version of the commercial looks exactly the same... but it's not.

You see, the old commercial featured the same race to the same track however it was a slightly longer advert. In addition to the advert being slightly longer, the lyrics were different to how they are presented on the 2009 commercial. But we aren't meant to think about that... The old advert featured a hungry car that scoffed everything in his way as he raced from 'Lunchtown' across a desert. His rival was a car with more self control who instead chose to eat only a Milky Way before they ended their race in the aptly named 'Dinnertown'. Unfortunately, the hungry car eats so much during his race that he ballons in size and when the duo are met with a broken bridge, the poor car falls as his lighter companion rushes to victory as a sign flashes: Milky Way: The Sweet You Can Eat Between Meals Without Ruining Your Appetite.

The new advert is pretty much the same concept but it makes less sense. They race for an unknown reason from a place called 'Playville' across the same desert to a place called 'Light Town' and as the blue crosses the line, the sign now flashes Milky Way: Lighten Up and Play. In addition to this, the lyrics of the song have been changed to accomodate the new advertising rules. Instead of the blue car choosing the Milky Way because it 'won't spoil his appetite' he now chooses it because 'its something that tastes just right'.  And it seems his intelligence has dropped and he's no longer 'smart old blue', he's just 'good old blue'.

The red car and blue car race in the old Milky Way commercial.

So what does this teach us? It teaches us that in the twenty years since the advert was first aired, we're now fickle enough to believe that eating a chocolate bar before a meal won't spoil your dinner and now have to be protected from this claim. It also teaches us that in the last twenty years we have become stupider... This is true, at least.

Some of the best adverts of the past ten or twenty years are now no longer allowed to be broadcast. Take the fantastic Tango commercial which involved an orange man walking around with a huge rubber glove on his hand slapping people whilst the voiceover stated 'You know when you've been Tango'd'. This admittedly was copied by a lot of school kids, but did removing this advert actually make people less violent? No. In fact, since that advert was aired, gun and knife crime is up. If the people who make the advertising rules were to look at those statistics in the usual oversensitive way they look at everything else then it would be correct to say that instead of going around slapping each other kids now go around stabbing each other. You know when you've been shanked.

The Tango advert that featured the man that slapped people for fun.

So companies have realsied that there is a certain public fondness for 'blasts from the past' and in just about every industry you can see things from past years bought into the public eye. We have remixes of old songs, remakes of old movies and even some old programmes being bought back onto our TV screens. The only problem is, these things usually have to be edited for our stupider, more politically correct audience and it means that there no longer seems to be as much investment in new things that make us smile. It may seem cruel to say that we're stupider but it really does seem to be the case. Take kids TV, for example.

When I was younger I was watching programmes like Thundercats and MASK along with the hugely popular fantasy gameshow Knightmare. These programmes dealt with good and evil, where the bad guys were genunielly bad and the good guys were representing everything good with the world. When the bad guys had the shit kicked out of them, they wouldn't learn a lesson, they would just want revenge... like real life. I also remember that kids TV would opt for the more extravagent ways of describing something rather than choosing childish, easy to understand words and statements. And as for the gameshows? I watched a repeat episode of Knightmare a while back and there were questions on there that I would've been completely unable to answer when I was in the age group of the kids on the show. These kids, with barely a moments hesitation, shouted the answers out as though it was common knowledge. We really are far stupider and for some reason in modern kids shows there are never any real losers.

So, I guess the point I'm trying to make with this long rant about our past is that whilst we should be proud of the programmes we watched as children and the adverts we remember so much, we shouldn't just edit them and return them to our screens we should try to better them and forget about the stupidity and sensitiveness of our modern audiences.

As final proof of public stupidity, the recent 'Manuelgate' scandal that resulted from prank calls made by Jonathan Ross and Russel Brand on a primetime BBC radio show received only a handful of complaints when it was aired. Nobody cared about what happened, but as soon as it was on the news and in the papers, thousands of people complained even though they'd not seen the show. Why go to the trouble? Idiots.

Let's all look to a bright future of entertainment and make our own judgement calls, take risks and create new material without having to constantly revert back to the 'good old days' for things to market.