JumpinJesus

Are reality television and user-created content on the Internet the cultural equivalent of the Great Flood?

Aside from the explosion of on-line shopping, the Internet is probably best known for its user-created content. Sites like YouTube and the endless sea of blogs have given every single person with access to the Internet and the motivation the ability to create their own content for their own and their friends’ consumption. Once in a while, a cultural supernova explodes and a new meme is created or a new YouTube sensation is uncovered – for 15 minutes, of course. All it takes is a jovially overweight fellow lip-synching to the latest Euro-trash song for the rest of us to clap our hands excitedly and squeal with delight. It’s even better if he dances or falls down. Better still if she’s very attractive and dumb. The overwhelming idea here is that it takes absolutely no creativity or forethought to create content that will get the masses all a-twitter over the latest craze. You know you’ve hit it big if you see your pixelated capture while the hosts joke about it on your morning news program.

User-created content has become so wide-spread that even news organizations such as CNN and FOX rely on everyday schmucks to send in their cell phone video captures as an augmentation to their shrinking journalistic staffs.

Television relies more and more on reality-based shows that use every day average people in place of actors to carry out pre-scripted events and hopefully do it in an increasingly antagonistic manner in order to get viewers talking about what they saw. Let’s face it, in an age of 500 digital cable channels, it’s a hell of a lot harder to stand out to the average viewer than it was 20 years ago.

Do a search for blogs. How many are there? How many books are in your local library? I’m almost certain that there are currently more blogs in the blogosphere than the entire count of books ever published. How many bloggers fancy him or herself the next Faulkner, the next Bukowski? The problem is that these bloggers often haven’t the slightest clue how to form a proper sentence, much less how to spell elementary words like ridiculous or definite, much less conjugate certain helping verbs like would have, could have, should have. To make matters worse, we uphold this ignorance as a badge of honor, as if those who might point out the illiterate notions of the communicatively disabled are somehow being stodgy or elitist. It is as if there is pride in illiteracy and we all applaud it.

What this boils down to is that our mass media, pop culture-driven entertainment juggernaut relies more and more heavily on amateur nobodies dying for their 15 minutes of fame in a Titanic-riddled sea of attention seekers. Instant pop stardom is the shattered piece of drift-wood among a sea of drowning wannabes and everybody is clawing to grip on to a piece of board in the freezing waters of irrelevance.
User-created content sites are the modern day, grown-up equivalent to the delusional galleries all parents have in their kitchen where they magnetically adhere their kids’ crappy crayon doodles as masterpieces for all their friends to see and comment on.

“Oh, your Spencer is just so talented!”

“Isn’t that a precious kitty Meghan colored!”

“Look at that tree! It looks so real! Oh, it’s a dump truck? Either way it’s just so precious!”

“Wow, that’s a terrific photograph. You really do have a great eye!”

“That’s the best stick-figure comic I’ve ever read!”

Where does all this leave actual talent, the real, raw, developed talent that only a rare few of all people possess? How much of it gets ignored or lambasted as pretentious by the jealous purveyors of mediocrity? What chance does real talent have when we’re told and we swallow the notion that user-created content, created by people whose only talent is the ability to press a button on their cell-phone or turn on their web-cam, is real, raw, viral, and most of all, authentic? It’s like amateur porn. Sure, it might be unscripted, but it’s often woefully unattractive.

Are we in the midst of a cultural Great Flood where we’re becoming awash in an ocean of mediocrity-held-up-as-genius? Is the chance of discovering a creative walnut in the batter of eternal mediocrity worth the price the rest of us pay who must wade through this tripe? Will this torrent ever end? Where’s the cultural Noah’s Ark?

__________________
"I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am" - Cormac McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses