Ubiquitous

Internet Epidemic: Part One

Humans have natural tendency to “blend in”, without which, we wouldn’t have the transparent trends creeping across the internet right now. Not all trends are bad. In fact I love some of these styles. Let’s take a look at those in the 12-20 demographic in The Internet Epidemic, Site Types and How to Recognize Them (A Field Guide).

Epidemic: Teen-bopperitis

Symptoms

• Giant celebrity grungy collage or blend header
• Because most of this age group can’t go into bars yet, they instead have two bars on their layout, one for the navigation and all that jazz and another for the content

• Block navigation that changes colour on hover
• Vast empty spaces to the left of the right
• Cutenews cutenews cutenews, WP causes too much headache for these suffering victims

• A huge list of tutorials all seem to be made in a hallucinationatory state, which probably occurred
• Expect words like Blend, PSDs, Celebrity Icons, Scribbles, OMGZGLITTERZ, [Stolen] fonts and
• No-Stealing Rules

Warning signs: If you see these on the sidebar - a scroll box of button rotations, an enormous list of affiliates, and About the Girl box that uses bold, italics, and underlines at a frequency of greater than 45%, a so-called admin panel that says “DO NOT CLICK” - please contact local pest control authorities immediately

Mutations: The teen-bopperitis may mutate into two forms: Good and Bad. Good contains relatively stylistic and complementary colours while Bad includes enormously long loading time and clashing colours that may bring anyone closeby to their knees (seek medical help ASAP!)

Treatment: Vows to give up their former ways and conversion to Maturity (Wordpress optional, convertees usually ditch the teen-bopper layouts because it’s too much of a pain to code it in WP and therefore resorting to simple minimalism Web 2.0)

Contagious level: Very high, mainly through affiliation

Go on to Part Two

Citations, see these symptoms in their natural habitats: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

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