Our Annoying World

MY GRADE:

I think a rite of passage of the angsty, misunderstood teenager is the prank call.

Example: dialing up Red Lobster and ordering a cooked telephone.  (And yes, that prank call of mine was met with curious silence from my friends, just as it is now with you.  Sigh.  Nobody ever gets my Salvador Dali references)

Well, nowadays it seems we are all collectively those mischievous teenagers and the whole world is one giant Red Lobster. (I’ll take a second to allow that horrifying metaphor to truly sink in).

It’s interesting, people often praise the immediacy of the internet as its greatest asset, the way information can spread virally in a matter of seconds.  Usually they’ll reference the Iranian Twitter Protesters or the fact that back in the days of the Lincoln Assassination people in the further reaches of the country didn’t even get the news of his death for several days (although I believe the first Lincoln Assassination joke was written a mere 30 minutes after it occurred — that still-classic one-liner: “So Mrs. Lincoln, aside from what happened, how did you enjoy the play?” Unfortunately, it was told to the actual Mrs. Lincoln and was received quite poorly)

In the DSL/Live Chat/Twitter age the big question is: Is it really such a good thing to be so immediately connected to the rest of the world when the rest of the world is only telling the truth 60% of the time?

Which leads to the topic at hand: celebrity death rumors.

Lately, we’ve all become prank calling teenagers, haven’t we?  How else to explain the sudden faux-deaths of Britney Spears, Harrison Ford, Jeff Goldblum, Tom Hanks, and most recently, Kanye West?

I think it boils down to this:

We all want to be heard in one form or another.  The internet, our new favorite toy,  creates the enticing illusion that with a few simple key strokes we can truly impact the world. Some of us use this power to run a grass roots campaign for political office, others use it to write brilliantly witty and insightful blogs (ooops, how’d that silly link get in there?  My bad!) and still others use it to pretend that Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes were devoured by giant man-eating clams while jet skiing off the coast of Italy.

*By the way, when spreading celebrity death rumors it’s always helpful to provide photograph evidence. Voila:

Okay Google, work your magic.  I expect Wolf Blitzer to be reporting this on CNN within 20 minutes.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 10:56 am and is filed under Media Ridiculousness, Silly Trends and Proclivities. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.