WEB MASTER TUCKER HOTTES says everything on the internet is fake
Is it real? Is it fake? Do you care?
There’s been a lot of fakery in the news lately, and the Internet is abuzz with fake girlfriends, fake performances, and the usual flow of fake viral videos and outrageous claims. Let’s take a quick look at those three categories and try to figure out the details and why people’s feathers are ruffled.
Fake performances
“Oh-em-gee, did you hear the latest? Beyonce-like totes stole the spotlight from the President and made doves cry and statues come alive and cured cancer and — what?! She was lip-snyching? STFU. NO WAY!” In a completely baffling scandal that I will dub Spangle-Gate, it would appear that an entire nation of people was duped into forgetting that live televised performances are not real. It’s shocking, apparently, to anyone who crawled out of his or her hermetically sealed bunker from the 1950s.
Brace yourselves, people, because I’ve got some bad news: most performances on T.V. are faked. Yo-Yo Ma caught hell last inauguration for finger-synching. Turns out, though, most people either have no idea who the cellist is or just didn’t care.
“But this was Beyonce!” Excuse me for sounding culturally irrelevant (I am a nerd, after all), but so freaking what? Aren’t there higher-profile and higher-esteemed performing artists out there? Not to mention, they all do it. All these major news outlets are interviewing sound guys and stage managers who are kind of embarrassingly admitting this happens all the time while simultaneously seeming just as baffled that I am that people don’t realize that. They then throw out all kinds of excuses about weather and whatnot affecting the performance for the viewers at home, and how the perfectly recorded (and tweaked by engineers, no doubt…) studio ‘live’ recordings are better, and blah blah blah who really cares?
Fake girlfriends
“Hey guys, I totally have a girlfriend, and she’s real, and then she got in a car accident that was also real, and then she caught real leukemia and died a real death coincidentally on the day my grandma also died.” OK, I’m not entirely sure whether or not Manti Te’o is epically dumb for believing a hoax, epically dumb for perpetrating a hoax, or epically dumb for telling people either way that he had a “relationship” with a Twitter account. I’m pretty tech savvy, and social networking is great, but I don’t even think when I was in high school I would have told people I was “dating” someone when communicating with her exclusively online.
“Maybe he was desperate/gay/seeking publicity/easily fooled?” I don’t really care a rat’s ass either way. The guy looks pretty dumb no matter how you slice it. He claimed to be in love with a Twitter account, people! It’s ridiculous!
Everything on the Internet is fake
“Wow! That bird carried away a toddler!” Fake. “Posting this status copyrights my account!” Nope.
“Check out this marine take a guy down with one punch in the ring!” Clip from a movie.
Look, lately I’ve been acting as my a vigilante Snopes cop on Facebook, and it’s getting annoying. Can’t people Google something that seems too good to be true before just blindly re-posting it? I swear, social media is making people dumber (see above).
Do we need to start putting labels on computers: “Warning: most things on the Internet are fake?”
Recent Comments