So the question is whether the original architects of social media were genuinely prescient or was it simply a lucky accident that they designated the readers and fans of online posts as “followers”? Because that is most certainly what the internet citizen has become and the environment that has developed: a microcosm of cultish leaders with sycophantic toadies hanging on their every word and “following” every edict, even – or most especially – the unspoken ones, the coded ones, the buried messaging that underlies the (un)scrupulously sculpted text.
Back in the day, the bullshittiness of the Weekly World was taken for granted; nobody believed that nonsense, did they? Well okay, perhaps a few wingnuts, but there’s a long tradition of wingnuts eager to embrace the dopiest theories and tropes (flat Earth, anyone? Protocols of the Elders of Zion?), so we’ll just set them aside in their padded crib for now and address the wider population, who viewed the paper as what it was: amusing flickers of post-pulp metafiction designed for a snigger and a snort and destined to line birdcages or stuff the toes of a vagrant’s ragged shoe.
Now here’s where the story gets funky. Here, as the population begins its descent into mass dementia, into cultural regression, into retreat from fact and news and science toward manufactured fantasy and pop-icon celebrity over reason and reality. Here, as the corporate news media stumbles and crumbles. As the general populace rejects literacy, logic, and discourse in favor of flash, edifice, and posturing. Reality TV producers saw it coming: the dumbification of media. Who wants to look at a talking head when they can ogle a hot bod? The less brains the better.
As MGM and Paul Weller noted, that’s entertainment. Only it wasn’t. Not exclusively. Not when it slithered like triffids into the news media. Not when hard news became soft news became infotainment became a profit vehicle became pure propaganda. Not when truth got pushed aside as irrelevant and conspiracy took the front seat along with its cousins dishonesty, distortion, and disinformation. (And thyme.) Not when Fox News not only quoted WWN stories as fact but modeled bloviating überconservative columnist Ed Anger as the template for the archetypal new rage newscaster.
Even then, who’d have thunk that the medium of delivery itself could devolve? Yet the clever architects, the brilliant minds who designed the virtual world that is aggressively eating alive the material one in which mankind once played stickball and pinball and all manner of physical balling, those programming geniuses devised a communication method in which the story itself – the meat, the substance, the energy, the explanation – is simply jettisoned. All we need is the headline: “Alien yeti impregnated by Elvis’ secretly conjoined twin brother!”
Welcome Twitter. Soon to be the personal property – or not – of the world’s richest idiot savant. (I’ll leave it up to you to determine which of those two words to emphasize.) One who has proclaimed that sedition, racism, threats, and fraud are all free speech that should be protected and embraced. A point of view that, frankly, has some validity, although it is far more nuanced than a 280-character WWN headline. Yet here we are.
The headline is now the story, the more salacious the better. It’s Weekly World News, only dumber. And the truly weird part is that people take it seriously. They not only swallow the headlines as the whole truth and nothing but the truth, they respond like obedient cult disciples, carrying out what they perceive to be the wishes of the hallowed leader, no matter how absurd or egregious. So here we are. A nation of chittering lemmings. Roll over George Orwell and tell Aldous Huxley the news.
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