"The Nine Circles of Internet Hell"

We've all seen the immeasurable impact that Dante's Divine Comedy has had on culture, religion, and literature in the West. It's certainly influenced the way we perceive "hell" and the consequences of our actions, but it's also influenced stylistic devices in literature. The downward spiraling structure of Dante's Inferno is now an incredibly familiar trope in Western culture and literature. Even sayings such as "the lowest circle of hell is reserved for..."show our unconscious knowledge of Dante's system of punishment.

While procrastinating on the popular website, Thought Catalog, I happened to find the article "The Nine Circles of Internet Hell" (http://thoughtcatalog.com/2012/the-nine-circles-of-internet-hell/). It's a witty article that takes the "sins" of internet users, orders them by severity, and punishes them with an appropriate contrapasso.

The first internet sin is overuse of common sites such as "Facebook/Twitter/Gmail." This is compared to Limbo in the Inferno, saying that "If you frequent just these three sites, you are a normal person who has not sinned. you are the guiltless damned of the internet world." In their eyes, using the internet for these kinds of basic features that we are all culpable of is not actually a "sin". This may suggest that the dwellers of heaven either avoid the use of the internet or find some special and productive (think of procrastination as a sin against nature similar to sodomy or usury) way of using it.

After this, most of the levels connect very clearly with Dante's circles. The use of internet porn is equivalent to lust and punished by a never-ending stream of porn pop-up ads, gluttony is represented by food blogs and reading them eternally with no chance to taste the food, and greed is related to users of a personal fundraising site called Kickstarter and the punishment is to always come up one dollar short of their fundraising goal.

With the exception of "6. Heresy = Falling Into K Holes" (you'll have to read this one to understand, it seems like a bit of a stretch to me) most of these "internet sins" seem well-connected to Dante and pretty funny. It even ends with treachery being equated to "Sh*t-talking Online," an issue that seems to get more serious all of the time with the recent controversy of internet bullying.

I think this article really shows that Dante's approach to addressing the problems of our time will never go out of style, no matter how cliche it may seem.

P.S. Even though I don't think "Falling Into K Holes" is very well related to heresy, I'd definitely say that it's my internet sin. I wouldn't have found this article if I hadn't spent half an hour clicking through different articles on Thought Blog. So maybe procrastination can lead to productivity.