I’m sure it’ll be a shocker to know that I abhor social media, and that I pretty much think it’s a metaphorical cancer on the entire god damn planet. I feel like just about everything terrible in the world now can be traced back to something related to social media, or that social media inevitably takes most things and somehow inexplicably finds every single way to make them worse than in which they started. Behind screens and occasional veils of anonymity, either people feel emboldened to be shitheads, or perhaps their true selves emerge when they feel the safest, outside of arm’s reach to the people they choose to fling stones at.
The bottom line is that social media tends to steer things into the tragically negative, rather than the one out of a hundred cases in which social media manages to do something good, to which the they’ll still get twisted into misguided and greedy intentions by association.
The problem is, social media has become so prevalent and commonplace in the world today, it’s become a primary source for news and general content. I’ve always made the analogy that social media has turned the entire planet into America Online, except that instead of subscribers holed in their houses looking for poorly photoshopped pictures of Kathy Ireland or Teri Hatcher naked, the vast majority of the modern world is connected to AOL, with shitty screen names, and the capability to IM one another or the entire world as a whole, at any given moment they feel like it, and they most certainly capitalize on such immediacy.
However, whereas in the past if celebrities, athletes or known figures were AOL subscribers, like hell would they let just anyone know what their screen names were. The last thing they would want is to have their email box pinging YOU’VE GOT MAIL every two seconds from fans, admirers and haters to have access to a direct line of communication with them. Somehow in this day and age it’s quite the contrary, and people who are known can’t not broadcast their online handles enough, with Twitter handles being the subtitle on just about any source of communication, and a seeming requisite space requirement on every form of marketing these days to account for a Twitter handle, Instagram handle, Facebook URL and whatever other social media platforms a person or entity feels the need to shill themselves on.
Obviously, I’m veering off point, as is often the norm when I rant, because my disdain at what started this train of thought snowballed a little off the original rails. But I was looking through my news feed this morning, and for some reason, surprisingly high on the morning’s recommended reads, was this link about AN AMAZING TWITTER CONVERSATION. I mean that’s already an oxymoron in itself because almost nothing on fucking Twitter can really be classified as amazing in my opinion, but I guess I was curious to see what fluffy bullshit could possibly be constituted as “news.”
It was a story about some random ordinary guy who responded to a random ordinary girl who said “remind me in seven years to not have kids,” seven years ago, and told her not to have kids.
That’s it.
Somehow, a random guy actually responding to a request, in the requested window of time is considered news. Sure, we’re conditioned these days to believe that a random guy doing it construes him as “creepy,” but what it really boils down to is that some guy fulfilled a request from a stranger, seven years later. On Twitter.
My eyes rolled hard at this stupidity, but I soldered on with my news feed, and it took all of the time it takes Vin Diesel to drive a quarter mile before I came across another “story” that ultimately began with, surprise, another god damn tweet.
Granted, it’s a little bit higher up on the social ladder, featuring a C-list sports personality in Bill Simmons tangling up with D-list NBA hanger-on Dwyane Wade, where Simmons rehashed an old beef and accused Wade of unintentionally-intentionally hurting a Celtics player back, also seven years ago, and took a jab at him hoping he wouldn’t do it again if the Heat get paired with the Celtics in this year’s playoffs. To which Wade basically responds to, prompting Simmons to make a fluffy response, and then this is turned into a story by the scintillating content creation from Complex.
News, everyone. This shit is news. People’s tweets are news, while an inadequately disproportionate amount of coverage is being given to bombers in Austin, shooters in Maryland, and a litany of global events that have direct impact or repercussions, affecting the United States, and perhaps your actual states or home towns. But nobody believes anything important, because we have a clown brainwashing everyone in sight into believing that all news is fake, and we’re left with a society that abjectly just tries to ignore it, instead relegating themselves to caring about people’s individual fucking tweets.
It’s times like this where I hate the world we live in today, and that most certainly fucking hate social media. I don’t have a legitimate Twitter account, and I’m pretty minimal with my Facebook activity, mostly on account of the fact that nobody knows how to communicate in any other fashion than through it anymore. But make no mistake, I think the world would be a much better place without either, but obviously that’s not going to happen any time soon, and even if it did, something worse would probably take their places.
Now pardon me while I try to pass the rest of my day by seeing what profound effect that a tweet from New Zealand, a tweet from Croatia, and a Tweet from Argentina is going to have on the entire planet.
