Can you stand another goose/sunrise pic from my parking spot at Cubelandia? I know you don’t want me to rant and rave and talk back to the news media. Fake or not. I don’t feel as though we have landed on an intelligible definition for “fake” in this context, same for words like “collusion” and “due process”. It would be a lot easier to talk to each other if we shared common understanding of the vocabulary of the year. The Chief Twit doesn’t help that with his propensity for spewing out volumes of Word Salad. Where I work, we get into the greatest difficulties when we are all speaking different “languages”. That’s when people like meeeee channel our former leader, the LSCHP, and clamor to slow down and define things. I need a PICTURE!

I don’t remember the term “fake news” being front and center during the 2016 election. What annoyed me at that time was what I was loosely calling “clickbait”. That term meant a couple of things to me. One, links to news articles that when I clicked over to them either had nothing to do with the headline that led me there or I had to read all the way through a bunch of unintelligible gobblety-gook to get to the one sentence that had to do with the headline. I am no journalist but I think that’s called a “buried lede”? Something like that. Secondly, I used “clickbait” to refer to articles that people (mainly on facebook) were sharing without reading. At least it seemed that way to me. After it (the election) was all over, I shared one myself. It was a link to a Huffpo article with a headline saying something like “Bernie Sanders can still win the election”. Well, I knew that wasn’t true but I clicked over out of curiosity. The first paragraph explained how he could win. The second was haha, gotcha! No way! The article went on to explain exactly what I experienced over and over, people sharing an article without READING it, then going along on their merry way. Clickity-clickity-click. Disclaimer: I was not a Bernie Sanders supporter, but you can damn betcha I’d’ve voted for him over the Orange Baboon!.

I am annoyed in general with people who do nothing but share other people’s content on social media. I have muted a few people because of that. I could almost see them sitting with their computer or phone, having their first cup of coffee or a cig, surfing and clicking share over and over and over again. Polly-tickle articles, cat and dog “funnies”, you name it. That said, I may mute people but no one has ever done anything awful enough to me that I have *unfriended* them, even a person who sent a couple creepy direct messages about the huge crush he had on me in high school. Unfriending is Middle School Behavior. Plus, you don’t know if someone has unfriended you unless you actively investigate whether or not you are still friends so what’s the big deal? If FB sent a nasty message to the unfriendee, like “Nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyaaaaaah-nyah, so-and-so has unfriended you”, that would be different. As it is, it’s just sorta like, “Okay, whatever, buh-bye”.

Here I said I wouldn’t rant and rave and that’s exactly what I did. No worries, I am actually in good spirits. It has been a difficult week for me to process the news so I guess this is a bit of a “meta” take on news media. From someone who is NOT a journalist. Anyway, we are heading over to Knights (in the rain) tonight and I gotta get goin’.

See y’all later. -KW

This entry was posted on Friday, October 19th, 2018 at 7:10 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.