The Internet is My Best Friend: Anchorwoman Fights Back, Presidential Gifs, Inatamite Objects on Twitter
We here at Yourpopfilter.com risk lives and limbs to bring you the latest and greatest from the worlds of film, music, television, (sometimes) books, and video games, but, thanks to Al Gore, today’s world of pop culture now has a sixth dimension: The Internet. The World Wide Web. The Net. Or, in my case, my closest friend. I’ll be sorting through the mountain of crap that takes up 99% of the internet to share that sweet, sweet, 1% worth knowing about.
Exhibit #1 Bullied News Anchor Calls Bully on His Shit, And It is Stunning
A video of local news anchor Jennifer Livingston circulated this past week in which she directly addresses a hurtful email she received from a viewer of the news. The d-bag not only berated her for being a larger-sized woman, but told her she has an obligation to the public to be a role model and she is letting people down. I mean, really. What is she thinking? I mean, young girls may watch her on the news and think, wow, there’s a confident, successful woman who is differently bodied than most of the empty-souled, idiots I usually see on television? And they may begin to think, hey, maybe beauty comes in all shapes and sizes? I mean, THE ATROCITY!
I am mostly amazed how calm and collected she comes off when talking about this. Also, she doesn’t make it about herself and about how someone hurt her feelings, but about bullying in general. Her observation that “if you are calling the newslady fat at home, then your child will probably go to school and call someone fat†is so spot-on the whole bullying issue.
Can I just talk about the minor gripes I have with this story? Ok, great. Firstly, this email to Livingston was unnecessary, ignorant, sexist, demeaning and rude. No question there. The guy is the very definition of a douchebag. However, can we consider this bullying? I say it’s all an issue of semantics. Livingston is a public figure with a public email address, so I am sure she gets lots of douchebags writing to her. She has the defenses to deal with assholes like this guy. I’m concerned because if the term bullying is thrown around too much, it may dilute the issue and prevent us from focusing in on the problem. However. as I mentioned, she turned it into insight about bullying among children, so I’m not all torn up inside of it.
Thanks to the power of the internet, the identity of said bully was revealed quite quickly, and blogs did not hesitate to post the man’s picture. he also issued a statement of “apologyâ€, in the form of the “I’m sorry you were offended, not for what I actually said†that is just so charming and genuine. My question is, why all the rush to post a picture of the guy? So anonymous internet commenters can make snap judgments on this guy based on the way he looks? Seriously. This was a great way to stop the cycle of judgement and name-calling, but was handled badly. Way to go, internet.
Exhibit #2 Rich Kids of Instagram
This tumblr has been around for a while now, but it’s the gift that keeps on giving and I rarely get tired of it. The tumble “curates†pictures from Instagram that appear to be very rich young people showing off their fabulously wealthy, jet-set lifestyles. I usually have equal and opposite reactions upon viewing the yachts, parties and luxury goods through the “Valencia†filter:
- Fuck I am so jealous.
- What sort of asshole would flaunt their wealth like this? I’m off to join the Occupy Movement.
The disdain for these pictures comes from power in numbers: all together on the blog, they paint a picture of spoiled, materialistic, vapid and uncaring youngsters. Individually, it is probably some very fortunate person who wants to show off his/her weekend to their group of friends. How is that any different than taking endless pictures of your overpriced meals? That’s a luxury most people can’t afford, so that’s pretty much also a dick move.
But, hating on folks is the point of the internet, so viva la judgement!
Exhibit #3 Novelty Twitter Accounts
If you want to piss me off very quickly, you can tell me that your opinion on twitter is that it’s just a bunch of stupid, trivial tweets about celebs and what people ate for lunch. That’s an ignorant and narrow view, and I’m sorry you are not able to harness the abilities of twitter. Sure, if you only follow the Kardashian family and Ashton Kutcher, you sure are going to be reading a lot of drivel. The comedic arts has thrived because of twitter, and of course you can read a lot of puns and bad jokes, but the ones I appreciate because they take thought and character development are novelty twitter accounts. These are accounts created by someone in which they tweet in character, sometimes as a fictional character, inanimate object, concept, etc. They pop up all the time, gaining notoriety, but then, more often than not, fade away after the original author grows tired or runs out of ideas. Some of the best ones recently are:
Exhibit #4 The Animated GIF
The animated gif is an ancient work of art left over from the early days of websites. Remember the geocities Jason Priestly fan page you used to look at all the time, and when you wanted to email the webmaster, there was a dancing letter that would fold itself into an envelope over and over, doomed to repeat for the rest of eternity? That’s an animated gif. These days, animated gifs are used to replace entire emotions and verbal responses. There was something called the presidential debate this past week, and my god, those two were seriously pandering to the gif makers. (I think they prefer to called gif artisans). Here are two of my favorite:
