We live in amazing times. And maybe thats the whole problem. In an incredibly short time, the internet and social media have radically changed how we interact with the larger world. And, you know, thats great and all, but like anything else there are both benefits and bane to any new form of social interaction. Typically its not long before some jackass figures out a way to annoy the piss out of everybody else with it. Lately my newsfeed is clogged with a particularly obnoxious form of clickbait. Youve seen it, Im sure. It goes like this: This totally normal thing happened... and you wont believe what happened next! For example: A homeless beagle dog wandered into this high school classroom ... AND YOU TOTALLY WONT BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENED! CLICK THIS LINK, CLICK IT RIGHT NOW AND PREPARE TO BE AMAZED AT THE UNBELIEVABLE EVENTS WHICH UNFOLDED! And youre like, OMFG! I cant WAIT to find out what happened! This must be, like, the most incredible thing of ALL TIME! Why, it must be so awesomely stupendous and amazing that I will be ROFLMFAO until I choke on my own copious laughter-tears of amazement. I bet it happened on common core testing day and the teacher gave the dog a #2 pencil and one of those fill-in-the-dot answer sheets as a goof and all the kids were like LOLZ its just a stupid dog and they made fun of the little beagle and taunted him cruelly until he felt sad and cried, but despite his emotional pain the scrappy little mutt got a perfect score anyway and the school got all kinds of federal funding and the dog became a hero and all the children loved him and he went on to an all expense paid scholarship at Johns Hopkins University where he majored in neuroscience and mechanical engineering and got a PhD in cybernetics and then founded his own company and made billions in defense contracts (despite his lack of opposable thumbs), which he then used to build a giant murder-bot armed with nuclear missiles and laser powered flame-thrower eyes that fired death-beams of chainsaws and killer bees and then the little dog climbed onboard and wagged his stubby little tail and hunted down all of those kids who laughed at him and stomped their dreams into the poisoned soil with his giant metal feet because beagle dogs do not like to be taunted and THEY NEVER FORGET! Now THAT would be something I wouldnt believe. And then you click on the link ... and it turns out that the rest of the totally unbelievable story is in reality COMPLETELY believable and is, in point of fact, not even particularly interesting. I see this as a subset of larger things, a side effect of living in the Information Age. Its not just social media, its 24/7 connectivity, its the 24-hour news cycle, its all the information of the world ported directly into our brains in full real-time streaming broadband. Were like crack addicts, we need a larger and larger jolt to get high. The noise floor is set so high nowadays that you often have to shout pretty damned loud and pretty damned hysterically indeed to get noticed - at least by the lazy and dullwitted lowest common denominator who naturally gravitate towards sensationalism and hyperbole. If the dog ISNT driving a giant robot tank full of killer bees and stomping school children into pudding, if the story isnt the MOST AMAZING THING, no one is likely to notice - at least not in enough volume to turn a profit. Which is why, I suspect, that the pundits and the media resort to comparing everything under the sun to Nazis and TV preachers spend an extraordinary amount time proclaiming the imminent arrival of the anti-christ and why a significant fraction of our population fully expects to be herded into FEMA Death Camps of Death run by giant killer robots, because if its NOT the end of the world as we know it, well, you know, whatever, man, what-ever. Maybe thats why we can walk past the hungry and the sick and the homeless without a glance, maybe thats why we can blithely turn a blind eye to poverty and desolation, maybe thats why we can continue assbackward into the future without regard for the consequences of our actions. Or maybe not. Even when its something relatively mundane, like the recent VA scandal for example, instead of rolling up our sleeves and fixing the real problems - which, truthfully would be a relatively simple task, legislatively speaking - we cant do anything unless its the crisis of the century. We live in an amazing time, and maybe that, right there, is the whole damned problem.
Posted on: Sun, 01 Jun 2014 20:12:19 +0000
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