Loading ...So…Journalism Has Come To This
By Evan ~ February 15th, 2008. Filed under: world news.
This might be the single most pathetic article I’ve ever read in any news publication ever. It comes from the prestigious Wall Street Journal, and it’s about social identity theft. Apparently there are not only people in this world who are dumb enough that they resort to websites in order to find romance, but there are people using those websites who cannot think of original ways to describe their interests, and take information from other users’ profiles. The article states, “Among the 125 million people in the U.S. who visit online dating and social-networking sites are a growing number of dullards who steal personal profiles, life philosophies, even signature poems. ‘Dude u like copied my whole myspace,’ posts one aggrieved victim. Copycats use the real-life wit of others to create cut-and-paste personas, hoping to land dates or just look clever.”
Doesn’t that just make you want to claw your eyeballs out and vomit in the empty sockets? How about this awesome statistic, “A search on MySpace.com brought up more than 700 recent comments that accuse others of stealing headlines, user names, songs, background designs and entire profiles.” And, of course, that’s just the type of thing some dork MySpace user would complain about — someone stealing a user name or song they used on their profile.
When the hell did everybody become so self-absorbed? For fuck’s sake, can’t two people enjoy the same song or the same quotes? I mean, I imagine these comments are being shared between friends, you have to be friends with someone on that website to leave a comment…since when is it bad to have the same tastes as your friends? What the fuck, people!
Buried deep inside this rambling, utterly uninformative prose, there lies a gem of an idea. “The Internet makes plagiarism anonymous and easy. Nearly half of high-school students and nearly 40% of college undergrads confess they copy online sources, according to surveys conducted by Donald McCabe, a founder of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University in South Carolina.” Now there’s a brilliant topic for a Wall Street Journal article. Take that stat and run with it. Talk to schoolkids about the pressure to take shortcuts or plagiarize online sources. It would make for a captivating piece. Instead, the author immediately digresses, and begins talking about books telling readers “not to fret about copying,” especially in the apparently imitator-packed world of MySpace or Match.com.
When the hell is social networking going to stop being newsworthy? Why the hell do I continue reading such asinine articles? I mean, yeah, it’s really funny reading the quotes from Internet nerds who complain about their great original idea being used by somebody else on their dating website profile, but what does it say about our society when this low-culture, uninspired bullshit is deemed newsworthy by one of the most prestigious news sources in the country.
We’re fucked.
Read the article The Cut-and-Paste Personality at The Wall Street Journal Online.
