Cyberspace is turning into bullshit now. It's no longer pure and innocent. The Internet lost her virginity with the advent of serious e-commerce. It's become just another way to let advertisers into our home. They knocking on our door at all times and I don't even know they ass. The intrusions are analogous to calling my house collect and not dialing 1-800.

We used to log in at 14.4, then 28.8, and then 33.6, now either 56k or for the fancy addicts like me, DSL. No I wont define the acronym for you cause its not relevant but it is a faster way to access things on net. Actually a faster way for websites to run scripts on your computer advertising “stuff”. I know you seen the little window with the 2.9%APR (I know you know what APR is) but they don't tell you that rate is only for 5 months and after that it jumps to 21.9%.

More than half of the sites that the typical web surfer will encounter these days are going to have ad windows popping up at you, the longer you stay on their site the more the ads will run across your monitor. If that site is offering you any products or services for free. U really in trouble! They are going to treat you like a porn surfer with APR ads popping up, cheap video cameras ads; you name it they got it. T.V. & Radio are already full of advertisements. Now the net is no different.

Men in particular know that after summer ends the place to chill is at sandbox.com or some sort of sports database site. Retreating from reality in year round fantasy sports simulation games. I am speaking from experience. NFL, NBA, MLB, NASCAR you name it they got it and no I am not defining those sporting acronyms either but whatever your addiction they got it. This is a great site but it's NOT REALLY FREE. You sign up and in exchange you give up data about you. Its only supposed to be for them but yet they have every other screen defaulted with a check box giving them permission to send your email and other data to their sponsors. You have to pay careful attention to that trick. If you just click to go fwd to do what you really wanted to do you just gave the ok for them to send your data to about 10 different “e- telemarketers”. You have to uncheck the boxes each time you log on. Where do you think all of your spam is coming from? Well now you know. These cyber telemarketers are tying up bandwidth with the crap and I am busy trying to get my joke of the day and wondering why it is arriving 5 hours later. It could be worse you could have AOL and you know with AOL you get an email account on Monday and open up your mail on Tuesday and you have about 40 pieces of spam. Yet AOL claims they don't know how that happened.

What about those creepy emails with the subject header saying “A friend sent you this”. You recognize the name, so you open it and inside the email is a link, which takes you to a site where you can send that same cool email to a friend but after that, the site is stalking you like an obsessed fan. Reminding you of your own birthday and asking you do you want to send more stuff to friends. Telling them that you book marked them just wont cut it. Now you thinking why the heck did I go to that site?

The only email practice more annoying than that is the friends who fwd you a email that has been forwarded about 20 times and you have to scroll down or click 10 times just to get to the meat of the message. On the real I just delete that shit, cause if you couldn't clean it up a little more before you sent it to me, it really wasn't that important.

But what really gets me green is the fact that Latino's and African Americans are still being steered to white owned sites geared at black and brown populations. ASSuming and naiveté are at work here but I can tell the difference. There are 2 Its similar to the situation with women's hair care products with names like African Beauty and yet are owned by some 89 year old white lady in Kentucky. She's the Founder, Principal shareholder, CFO, CEO etc.(again I am not defining those acronyms for you either.) She has a patent on the word Africa and you can't even use that term if you want to come out with a competing hair care product. The net is the same way we have Blackplanet.com (for AA's) and MiGente.com (for Latino's) owned by whites and Asians. The sites are like mirror images of each other cause the same company runs them. But its not just Blackplanet its Blackvoices, Blackfamilies.com, of course BET.com now falls into this category but I don't even want to count them cause since their T.V. programming is so bad is their any reason to think they would have a different presence in cyberspace? I cant even count the number of embarrassing things that I have seen at their site but if I had a nickel for each. I would be a millionaire. Blackplanet is a W.O.C.C. site and I WILL define that acronym it stands for White Owned Controlled Conceived. I am not picking on BP, but if I were SO WHAT. I could run a long list of these types of sites but this data has been reported before. It seems that some “minority” groups keep the same habits in real life that they do in cyberspace and therefore would rather spend their advertising dollars with “Da Man” because ultimately that's what all this junk mail and running ads on our screen are about and that's advertising dollars. Anyway Nuff said!

Released: August 2001

The views and opinions expressed herein by the author do not necessarily represent the opinions or position of Playahata.com.