The Internet is an Example of Responsible-ish Neighborhoodly Sprawl

It seems that sprawl has spread beyond the boarders of the physical world.

Ever since Al Gore invented the internet, developers bought up bandwidth space and began developing it, disturbing the wires and motherboards of computers everywhere. Computers were set up everywhere, sold and operated side by side regardless of price tag. However, this did not prevent some sort of class distinction. Macs, Alienware, and finer Hewit Packard products were made flashy as to outshine the poor Toshibas and Acer models that were cheaper. Colorful accessories like external hard drives and thumb drives also contributed to a cookie cutter effect in the lap top world.

Users of the internet became even more dislocated from physical interaction than they already were. It is now possible (and not creepy) to be friends with hundreds of people you don't actually know. You can throw a snowball at someone in July in most developed nations without much more than a click, and a language of acronyms has made proper grammar usage obsolete.

Mall parking lots became less full thanks to the ultimate form of energy efficient transportation: the online store. Now people didn't have to worry about burning fuel or wasting calories, they could just sit back and let the computer do it for them. There is a downside to this emergence of cyber building: '404 Error Not Found'. It is like a culdesac in a worm hole, because occasionally when you try to reverse yourself with the back button it resets your information to twenty minutes ago when you filled out your credit card information, and then prompts you to fill it out again.

The advent of internet shopping has positive and negative effects of the communities it touches (basically everywhere but North Korea and Afghan caves). Businesses do not need to spend money on shops in order to have a shop; they just get orders over the computer and run to parcel services to ship goods out to the consumers. They can be open twenty four hours a day and not have to pay a staff to manage the 'store', saving the business money and capital. However, this also means that land developers are loosing mini-mall contracts to the webmaster nerds who they beat up in their school days. Those in the infrastructural industries are loosing money and jobs as the roadways they manage become less used and less in need of maintenance. As the cyber market expands the American people get less of a usage return for the roads and bridges that were made possible by their efficiently spent tax dollars.

This loss does not just apply to government and their minions. Air travel is impacted as more and more people opt to do meetings through Skype and spend their vacation time in the caves and coastal downs of WoW. Organizations that serve animals and humanitarian efforts have also been hit, as more people commit to save their galaxies or to adopt virtual pets that love them even if they don't get fed.


Sprawl has made it's way into the cyber world, going where the people go. While it has made life easier it has also made humaity even more distant than it already was and cost many their jobs and vacation houses. Internet usage is something that should be taken seriously and controlled properly so as not to lead to the imploding of our society at large.

-Virginia Dobson