E-Dribble

What’s the difference between Prince and I?

I mean besides the facts that he’s got incredible musical talent I don’t, he can pull off dressing like a fruit while I can’t and he’s a Jehovah’s Witness while I won’t even let them into the house?

Well, he can say things like “the internet is over”, and nobody blinks an eye.  The interview continues without any snickers.

That’s power.

In my opinion, you have two types of people that make a statement like this.  First, you have the person that is out of the loop enough to only be aware of something if it’s in the headlines.  Once it’s dropped to normal usage levels and is no longer talked about by people with nothing better to do than regurgitate the hot topic of the minute, they assume that it doesn’t exist any more.  All of the people that a few years ago said “blogging is dead”, “IRC is dead” or “facesitting is dead” obviously missed a memo. They don’t see it in the headlines any more, and they don’t personally utilize the technology any longer, ergo it’s dead. As we all know, these things still exist, they’re just no longer hyped.  Those that use the hype as their tool to gauge a technology’s usefulness are the type of people to use an on-off switch method of determining the popularity of something.

Then you have the person that says something is dead because they very much wish it were. Prince falls into this group. He wishes the internet is dead, so it’s dead.  You see, Prince sued various sites around the web a few years ago in an effort to keep people from seeing him prance around in purple leotards without paying good money to do so. Like many aging pop icons, he views the internet as the cause of his descent into obscurity. It’s not that he got so batshit crazy for a while that people really didn’t want to think about him, much less listen to him.  It’s the fact that a Youtube video of some drunk coeds had a soundclip of 1999 as the background music that has caused him to lose a mad amount of cash.

In spite of the reason he’s doing it, you have to feel kind of sorry for him.  He’s like your granddad that yells at kids to get off his lawn or that people are driving too fast around him.  Providing he doesn’t sue me for anything, he’ll continue to get nothing but pity from me, as I can totally relate.

Facebook and Twitter are dead.