Sometimes, you have to sit back and look at our culture, because it’s going to be a really amusing read many years from now if most of this stuff hits the history books.
I was commenting to my boss the other day about a music video (that’s two site links, to get proper credit) that pays homage to a webcomic that rewrote an advertising jingle from the Discovery Channel. What’s most notable about it is that it features numerous web personalities (I have no better overall term for these), that someone had to contact, videotape them singing (or get them to send in their own recording) and sync into a video. And they all did it because they knew the webcomic. Not to mention, are bona fide geeks. I’m talking about people like Phil Plait the Bad Astronomer (“I love the whole world” in front of the picture of Saturn and the Earth), Miss Cellania of her own blog and Mental Floss (I’m pretty sure that’s her in the middle at the first boom de yadda), Neil Gaiman the author, Wil Wheaton the actor (Wesley Crusher from Start Trek TNG, which might make you wince, but he’s much less annoying himself), and frankly a whole lot of people I don’t know, but have to find out.
Anyway, if that isn’t a good enough example of our weird culture, maybe this is:
I have a spam filter on my commenting system because, unfortunately, that’s about all the comments I get. Most get blocked, but some come through for moderation. And I have to admit, they’re trying much harder now to wiggle their way in. Listen to this:
“You put together a great position with what you explained. A great number of people have to read your article to allow them to get a greater point of view about this issue. It was great of you to provide great information and encouraging arguments. After reading this, I know my thoughts are pretty certain about the matter. Keep up the fantastic job!”
Trust me, that’s not one of the better ones I’ve received. Such effusiveness! Such loquaciousness! (I knew I had a thesaurus for a reason.)
And yet, a total miss, because it’s a comment on this post, where I rambled on about, well, rambling on. It’s one of the most meaningless posts I’ve made, at least in the bottom three (feel free to open the voting on that one.) If there’s a point I made in there, it escaped even me.
Of course, spam has a reason, mostly to attempt to spread links around, and often viruses (I use that term to mean all of the variations like worms and trojans, don’t get technical on me.) The link embedded in this one, which I will not click or repeat, seems to be for an iPhone app.
That’s another swing-and-a-miss! I detest cellphones at large, and think the iPhone is a senseless toy. And many, many people are expending a lot of effort writing inane applications for it to try and collect even more money from people who think they didn’t waste enough on their toy. All that, however, is topped by the efforts spent by spammers to try and get me to advertise/propagate their shit on my site. And someone is actually paying for that.
I’d like to think that one day our descendants will look back on the business practices of this time period and wonder how we got so far off track. I’m a little scared that they’ll look back nostalgically and wish they could return to such “better values.”