Ever found yourself playing an online game and some random stranger comes up on you and stands in your face and shouts at you something like, OMG U R LEETZ !!!1!1!!1!!!
Well, it happens from time to time, don’t feel bad about it or get upset, the person who is making this scene probably has no clue who you are and doesn’t really care either. So, how has a situation like this come to be? There are so many different things I could talk about, but let me start out by touching on the phenomena known as leetspeak. To talk LEET you more than likely were born in the 90’s and have had a personal computer in your household from the time you could talk. Kids these days spend more time “chatting” with their friends than they do outside playing catch or riding bikes down the street. Is this bad? Well, you can look at from different perspectives of course, one way you can look at it is the kids these days have much more weight problems because they aren’t as physically active as say my generation was growing up. Then on the other hand, you can say the kids are safer because they are in the house with their family and there isn’t that chance of them getting hurt or even worse, getting kidnapped or killed while outside doing whatever they would be doing. But, back to the leet chat, the great vastness of the WWW is worldwide and anyone with access to it can see how much of an impact this has had on the culture of the world. Is it a new language? This could be a matter of debate depending on who you talk to of course, I myself just see it as something similar to ebonics, remember all that from the 90’s? It is just another type of slang made popular by the youth of the world embracing something cooler than their parents can understand or care to learn, so that makes it cool…Remember what being cool was like? LOL
Don’t get me wrong, leetspeak isn’t just something teenage kids with no life use, it has become something of a standard for some people, to try to out-leet the next guy, if that is even a word…it is now, using numbers and having your CAPS LOCK KEY STUCK is the coolest way to talk to people online…
Well, I am not leet, I never will be leet and for that matter, I don’t think I will ever be cool again either…but I don’t really care, let all those 20 year old virgins who dwell in their parents basement be the cool ones, just leave me be and don’t expect me to accept your leetspeak as a language I will embrace anytime soon.
I read something in some book a long long time ago that said if we could read each others minds, we would instantly go insane. I think this is true, as in my online adventures, I’ve met people who randomly do things like the OMG ur leet! statement, and I try to ‘mindshift’ myself into the place they might be coming from…what is this person like in ‘real life’? Would they annoy the crap out of me there as much as here in cyberspace? What kind of life experiences would they have had in order to behave like they do?
And then I hear the Insanity Phasers powering up behind me, and I know I have to disengage quickly. Usually eating something ‘re-grounds’ me.
I think it’s a good thing that humans have been granted a certain distancing mechanism from others’ realities, almost a flak jacket for the mind.
Although, it just occurred to me, could all this internet exposure to the thoughts and realities of others be directly contributing to what appears to be the rapid world acceleration toward insanity and chaos? Or is that just my cynical view of things? Hmmmm….