Anti-Social Media

If studying Media at a low-ranked former polytechnic university at the turn of the century taught me nothing else (and it didn’t), it’s that “Media” is a seething, teeming, unstoppable mass of faceless,  barely-concealed prejudice, pro-corporate statist totalitarian racistsexisthomophobic surveillancepropaganda and kitten-pic-sharing minor irritants.

Even before that, I was one of those “I’m different, me” teenage twats that liked bands that split up before I was born, films made before I was born and books written before I was born, and hated all the bands and films and books all my peers liked.  (I wasn’t even good at that.)

So I’m not pre-disposed to like the general hum of internet traffic.  What really boils my patayter, though, is click-bait titles like 25 Times Instagram Made Your Life Better and Frankie Boyle Just Owned Nigel Farage On Twitter and This Girl Just Shut Down Trolls and 32 Things Only Millenial Bellends Will Understand.

I don’t understand reading an article that talks only about another article you could very easily find.  Especially when it quotes the original “good” article and a couple of witless facebook responses to it.  How many articles are there like this?  Billions.  Why not just read the original source article?  Pure bloody bastard clickbait.  There’s loads of videos that do the same thing.

For those over the age of 342, click-bait is stuff that lures you in, the way naked women on Page 3 used to do for extreme right-wing propaganda comics owned by Murdoch.  It works by attracting readers (or, probably more accurately, viewers) to a page which then exposes them to all the usual adverts for clothes, life insurance and dating sites.  The undisputed Kings Of Click-Bait are The Mail Online, the internet version of everybody’s least-favourite pro-fascist anti-human rag, The Daily Mail.  You’ve probably never seen it, because you’re a nice, normal person and prefer to concentrate on things you like/care about/can do something about, but every single article on the website has an endless side-bar list of pictures of women in dresses or bikinis, which should have titles like Woman Wears Dress/Bikini In Public or Famous Woman Makes Life Decision Inconsequential To Everyone But Herself but actually have titles like X & Y Pose In Edgy Magazine Shoot and Tanned Z Shows Off Beach Bod On Family Holiday.

I hate this website almost as much as it hates women.

Andy Warhol was right, and now everyone is getting their 15 minutes of fame; by the 4^th minute most people are bored, and if they struggle through the whole 15 they get to the jaded, drug-addled stage.  It seems quick, but you try sitting through 15 minutes of someone else going through it on youtube…

The very WORST thing, however, is a writer that can’t think of anything interesting to write about and just bashes out 500 words of misanthropic, anti-everything, modern-life-is-rubbish bullshit aimed at easy targets; an embittered middle-aged rant at young people and all the things they like.  THAT’S the worst, isn’t it?

There, that’s 500 words. Invoice enclosed.