Sometimes I find myself wondering about so-called "influencers," and about what people consider to be "important" in life.
Occasionally, I can be caught doing a bit of random scrolling on YouTube, Instagram or Facebook... and it pretty much amazes me what evidently is worthy of millions of views. Sometimes, I even watch these reels several times... just to make sure I didn't miss something.
But no. It's all pretty much a big load of nothing.
I'm open to the possibility that I have just become an old fuddy-duddy, and I am missing the entire point. But I just can't turn what feels like little more than "moving colors on the page" into something something worthy of my preciously scarce time.
Invariably, I end up sitting back and pondering the seemingly real reality that the entire species is rapidly devolving towards the dystopia of that 20-year old cult movie, "Idiocracy."
What made the world this way?
Or was the world always this way, but somehow I blinked and missed it? Or am I just more aware of it now that we have instant communication and news feeds, thanks to this marvelous invention we call the Internet?
The more cynical part of me thinks that perhaps this is all just part of a giant cash grab, and the easiest way to grab a slice of that is by appealing to the most inane and lowbrow part of the population. I remember quite well from my University days being informed that when you go into a bookstore, less than 5% of what you find on the shelves there contains anything that resembles literature quality. Everything else — that is the other 95% — is basically pulp.
I have encountered this first hand in my life, when writing articles for submission to magazines and being told that they were quite good, but that they needed to be dialed down to a 9th grade level.
I guess the thing that baffles me the most about online content is this notion that you are basically creating content on the premise that something that is of no consequence to anybody is actually really important and worthy of creating a 20 minute analysis clip. All you have to do is come up with a catchy fear based clickbait title and you seemingly have it made!
Somehow I can't shake that idea of something that is "an answer in search of a question."
"A great life hack to keep your underwear from wrinkling!"
Why is this even something that we are talking about? And who determined that anybody thinks about that? And why have 800,000 people looked at it? That last one is perhaps the most baffling of all!
But if we can somehow convince people that they are missing something or they are somehow less than if they have wrinkled underwear, then we've got a winner on our hands!
Feel free to leave a comment — this IS "social" media, after all!
As always, a 10% 