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Internet, 27 February 2008

Memo to E! Online and its readership: YOU ARE DUMB.

I know I harp on this a lot, and I know it's not exactly speaking truth to power, but when, dear readers, is the Internet going to be free of the tyranny of the comment thread?

I realize it's my crotchety old Web 1.0 bias showing through again, but dammit, those kids ARE on my lawn. I expect, as an inevitable byproduct of the Information Age, a certain amount of noise. Useless information. But there's useless information, and there's fuckety useless fucking information, if you catch my drift. There's a spectrum, a hierarchy, if you will, in which some useless information is more equal than others. And nothing captures this hierarchy in all its breathtaking beauty like the E! Online article about Whoopi Goldberg getting snubbed by the Oscars.

Allow me to present what you learn on one single webpage, in order of increasing fucking uselessness:

That Whoopi Goldberg was not included in the Oscar montage of memorable moments.

That the topic came up afterwards on The View.

How Whoopi Goldberg felt about being excluded.

How average complete strangers feel about her being excluded.

How people with poor punctuation and grammar feel about her being excluded.

How idiots who can't spell Whoopi Goldberg's name right feel about her being excluded.

How morons who can't spell anything right feel about her being excluded.

And how people whose demonstrated intellect shouldn't allow for the ability to chew without flashcards and diagrams somehow managed to express how they feel about her being excluded.

Nobody needs to know any of this, unless they're Whoopi Goldberg or hang around with her on a regular basis. But clearly, the amount of resentment a sane person would feel at learning this stuff increases as you move down the list. Resentment that could have been avoided if only E! Online had the self-awareness to realize it was already scraping mold off the bottom of rocks, and thus didn't need to ask its readers HOW IT TASTES.

Resentment that I wouldn't now feel compelled to spread out by distributing it to the vast and undeserving You Are Dumb Dot Net audience. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"despite the political climate surrounding the most successful black and woman presidental candidates. nothings really changed. when included at one front; excluded on another. equality can't & won't exist until man has totally procreated out any simblance of a pure race....or the old guard and current generations have become extinct. i'm 60yrs old and i say power to future generations." - Eddie Williams is wrong in two ways. Oh, his heart's in the right place. We are a long way from equality. However, he's wrong to use the E! Online comments thread to spread his limited and wildly misspelt wisdom, and he's wrong to overstretch those limits and compare thirty seconds on the Oscars to the entire presidential campaign.

"Give me a break. She WON an Oscar!!! They showed that clip. Wasn;'t that the more meaningful moment? She hosted it several times and was not honored for that. * and she was not the only one omitted) Sounds like she has had many wonderful things happening in her life. There are a lot of struggling actors who would love to just be in the room. I like Whoopie, but I am disapointed in her over reaction. Whatever happened to the grace and dignity of "it is nice be honored." - Anne is upset about Whoopi being upset. Ergo, Anne is triply wrong. She's wrong to care either way about this, she's wrong to post about it, and she's wrong about the extra "e" at the end of Goldberg's first name. GET OFF MY GODDAMNED INTERNET.

"Three Cheers for Whoopie and by the way anne you sound like Rosie O'Donnel pure negative, and that is an oxymoron................I think that someone needs their little hand slapped.....OUCH! You are the Best in my Book Whoopie!" - Someone without even a name, just a bathroom-door head and torso icon, is upset at people being upset about people being upset. It would save time to focus on what the Unknown Dipshit got right, BUT THERE ISN'T ANYTHING.

But if I could reach across the vast gulf that separates us - the geographic gulf, the intellectual gulf, the gulf of anonymity - if I could jump that vast gap like it was Snake River Canyon and make one thing perfectly clear to this person, it would be that "pure negative" is not a fucking oxymoron. And maybe, just maybe, if they spent less time reading and posting on celebrity trash entertainment gossip sites like E! and more time with a god-forsaken Webster's, they'd know that.