I’ve been thinking this week about how isolated I am from "them". When I’m working with the public I get almost daily reminders that my fellow countrymen are not as smart/educated/intelligent/informed and/or rational as I’d like to think they are. I think most people exposed to Mr John Q Citizen on a regular basis would agree they’ve encountered more than their fair share of chicken-fuckin’-morons throughout their careers. My problem I think stems from the fact that I’m not exposed to the public anymore and when this happens I tend to get this sort of distance from ‘the masses’ and then I forget (way too easily) just how (and this going to sound horrible) totally fucking stupid ‘people’ are.
As it happens I like to think I surround myself with fairly intelligent beings… many of whom are university educated… most are quite well read… interested in current affairs, both local and abroad…. and they possess a wide range of interests and amazingly diverse knowledge bases. From these preceding statements I think it’s safe to say that I have a habit (bad or otherwise) of avoiding people that might fall into the ‘six pack short of a piss up’ category. Call me a snob if you like…. I can live with that.
The thing is… when I am under exposed like this, I’m frequently amazed when presented with new evidence at just how stupid we’re talking here. Today I was smacked upside the head today with the dead smelly haddock-of-short-term-memory-loss with a reminder of how stupid ‘people’ seem to WANT to be. Today I stumbled over what I percieve to be an indicator of a mass willful ignorance.
I tend to keep an eye on the BBC News website for international news largely because (to quote Eddie) the Brits seem to recognize that there is like… other countries out there – other than their own and the US. Anyway I found this article today that Yahoo has released it’s top ten most searched terms of 2008 and they are…. drumroll please…
Britney Spears
Britney fucking Spears is THE most searched item on Yahoo this year??!?! WTF?!?! Oh no wait…. it gets better (snipped from article) "For the last seven out of eight years, Britney Spears has been the most popular search term". You have got to be kidding me… who are these masses of people with lives so banal that they actually give a shit what this doped up, over indulged, talentless git is up to? I sure as shit don’t.
No doubt these results are somewhat skewed due to the fact that the Yahoo search engine isn’t exactly THE most popular or widely used client but it is one of the heavy hitting favourites in certain demographics. And no… I’m not about to launch into some American bashing here (though it is quite a popular pastime among non-Americans) we have more than our own fair share of bottom feeding celebrity voyeurs in Australia too.
But I honestly just don’t get it. I love being alive in the computer age. It’s an exciting time to be around and watch what the world is making of itself – the good and the bad. The internet is an amazing tool…. to have this veritable plethora of information (though it be of varying reliability) at our fingertips is incredible. The opportunity this affords us for enriching our lives and understanding the lives of others is just phenomenal…. and that is an understatement of epic proportions!!!
I can honestly say – with the exception of Barrack Obama – I’ve never searched for any of these things…. that is of course, until two minutes ago when I searched ‘Naruto’ and ‘Runescape’ to find out what they actually were. :$
So… yeah… now I’m going to have to go find out what Google’s most common searches are for 2008…. and I’d be interested to see what Aussies are searching en masse too.
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