What has the internet done for you?

I'm walking down the street, heading from my apartment to a friend's house to spend an evening together. We plan on eating dinner out on the town, maybe grabbing a beer at a bar with decent music, and then back to their place for a movie and a possible episode of Blackadder. It's already dark, but I feel perfectly safe walking down the street by myself, my earphones securely pressed into my ears so they don't fall out. I reach a main intersection, and see a cop talking to a guy on a delivery moped, the kind I see all the time doing 40mph or more on sidewalks congested with pedestrians. The moped guy looks unhappy and resigned, and the cop has a little hand-held touch screen device that I'm sure is about to issue the moped guy a ticket. And I think to myself "saw a moped guy getting a ticket, and wondering why we never saw it in Uijeongbu".

image from scootersandthings.blogspot.com

This quote, then, would have been my status update online when I arrived back home, had I remembered to write it. I am constantly thinking of myself in the third person now, thanks to sites like twitter and facebook, and it wasn't until recently that I even realized it had happened.

I used to take "mental pictures" of things that I saw that were of interest to me. I often lose these pictures in my head, partly because I have a bad memory, and partly because they just weren't that important. Now I take mental notes of things that I'm thinking or doing, and think of them in the third person. Things I think other people may want to know about me. Things I think are insightful. Things I just think of.

Often these 'thoughts' never make it to my status updates. I either come across something more interesting, I forget what I thought I would remember, or I finally sit down to the computer and realize it really wasn't that interesting after all. Either way, though, the way I mentally process the world around me has changed. I am more aware now of what I think (though the why is not always readily apparent), and I've become a bit less self-conscious in the process.

How about you?