INTERNET PAWN

As we are all well aware, the Internet is stacked high with pornography - you simply can’t avoid it, no matter how hard you try. Who hasn’t been startled by images of a mustachioed Dane being attended to by a young extrovert sporting only undergarments and a shaggy perm after inadvertently appending an “n” instead of a “t” on the end a Google search for “vintage port”? How many of us have been confronted by a hangarful of large-chested exhibitionists during research into “large mistakes”, due to our mistaken employment of the ambiguous search term “big boobs”? Erotica is big business, but there’s also a lot of free stuff around if you put in the hours looking for it. Apparently.

Another rapidly growing area is that of the Internet Sage. In common with the filthmongers, they are in the business of selling fantasies. I often wonder if my blog would be rewarding me financially if visitors were greeted by a picture of me looking wise next to a tree or something, my visionary gaze clapped firmly on infinity - perhaps under the subtitle “Reformatting the hard drive of your soul”, or “Experiments in lifestyle plumbing.” I might even manage to swing a book deal to publicise my tatty philosophising – “Finding a Life Home – From Bungalow to Penthouse in Three Easy Yoga Positions”. Then I would join the merry band of Internet authorities who write little articles on “How to Give Up Giving Up”, “10 Mistakes That Lead Winners to Lose”, and other such froth. Often these authorities quote each other, thus creating a self-propagating, self-aggrandising clique.

Before I am accused of being anti the self-help genre, I must confess that when I was younger I showed a total lack of interest in these kinds of works, perhaps the result of a pioneering independent spirit, arrogance, or stupidity. After a time, I overcame this prejudice and read some publications avidly, and actually found some of them very useful. There are some insightful and thought-provoking writers, normally those who have some kind of background in psychology or psychiatry, whose genuine motivation to help others shines through in their prose. The self-appointed Internet Shamans, however, are normally just very clever marketers, sometimes attracting millions of visitors to their shiny smorgasbord of insipid ruminations.

Having said that, I find myself visiting these blogs on a fairly regular basis – they do exert a certain morbid fascination. One favourite is Steve Pavlina’s entertaining “Million Dollar Experiment”, to which people have signed up in the belief that they will manifest incredible riches through intention alone (in the process finding some elbow room on The Secret bandwagon). The results make sobering reading, especially participant number 15, Silvino Henriques, who has apparently “manifested” the sum of $22.08 in just under eight months. If Silvino got a job, any job, he’d manifest more than that in a few hours. I could tell him that.

No wonder the most popular Internet search word is “sex”.

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