Facepalm of the day

The non-news of the morning is apparently that we’re a culture of whiners.

 

http://www.news.com.au/money/money-matters/its-hard-to-be-heard-above-the-whingers-as-consumer-rights-become-a-toxic-culture-of-negativity/story-e6frfmd9-1226614321771

 

No surprise there, given we’ve spent the last 20 years telling everyone the customer is always right, right?

 

Take the fact that some people are just whingers, throw in some freeloaders, sprinkle in a few scamming ripoff merchants and finish off with people who just flat out have totally unreasonable expectations. 

 

That’s what we’ve always had.

 

Now multiply that exponentially by a consumeristic society with a terminal case of narcissism and enough entitlement syndrome to be self-sufficient in moral outrage for the next century, and that’s what we’ve got now.

 

Finally, factor in ubiquitous access to the internet and social media that means even the most blindly cretinous person can now make their mindless rambling babble visible to others, and you can bet some vacuous me-too sycophant will “like” it too.

 

The simple reality is that as Scott Adams once wrote, one of the originally suggested names for what we now call “the internet” is “I’m a moron and I’ll prove it, too!”.  Just because someone has managed to peck out their mental dribble on a keyboard does not mean it’s automatically worth reading, any more than a “like” means that someone made the momentous effort of moving their mouse about a centimetre and applying pressure with one finger.  Both only mean anything if you want them to.

 

We need to get out of this mindset that because we read it, it must be true.  That went out the window right around 1995 when Bill first gave Joe Average access to the net without much in the way of knowledge.