Thing 11--Social Media

Does it bother anyone besides me that one of the principal selling points of all of these things is their unedited nature? By golly, in the true spirit of the American frontier, nobody is going to tell the social mediocrity what's a fact and what isn't. Not that editors are perfect, as the editors at New Republic who believed Stephen Glass could testify. They do try, and some places even have fact-checkers. Of course, with corporate media cutting back, practical things like facts don't have the value they once did. Opinions and attitude are much more important, which explains the prosperity of a number of people who should be belted across the chops rather than paid extravagantly for badly-written books and vulgar TV and radio programs.

As a librarian I have spent my professional life trying to find the most accurate, most useful information for people, information that I believed came from a dependable source and I could in conscience provide to people who needed it. Now I find that the musings of anybody with computer access count as information. Those faceless multitudes with their screen names and outright ignorance are to be trusted without question because this is democratic information. Twaddle! We don't know who they are, what their qualifications might be, or who's paying them. The voice of the people may as the Latin would have it be the voice of God, but it is frequently the voice a lot of people talking rot.

If people want to enter into a shouting match or even a civil discussion in social media about Angelina Jolie's favorite tablecloth or the True Meaning of whatever is the hot topic of the moment, then by all means let them do so. There are worse things they could be doing. There is not a lot new here, you know. Blithering idiots have taken scraps from the news and turned them into something to astound the weak minds of the Great Unwashed forever. This just uses a computer. The inanity and ignorance do not change, merely the way of inflicting it on others.