And Now For Something Completely Different…

haven’t posted blog entries on successive days in a long while humanoids, so you are blessed. *WARNING*, the main body of this blog entry will be a rant against something I read today. I’ll get to that later on.
The customary, “how was your day” bit will begin and end here: same old stuff in school, lots of good revision done in German and Computing, renewing my belief I can prove a few teachers wrong with my exam results (eg. Slimey Steve). Lunch time was a good laugh, although having to be the father of everyone when the thunder and lightning struck 5th lesson (which I said it would at lunch. Nobody who was with me 5th believed me until we heard the first crack of thunder).


My day wasn’t that bad then, so imagine my chagrin when I open up Page 34 of the Daily Mail today to read an article by Sarah Sands entitled “Dawn of the Cyber Mob?”, and a picture adorning much of Page 35 of what appears to be a teenage girl using a laptop with the logo of Bebo on the screen of the laptop. The article then goes on to criticise the generation of users who go on about Bebo, and basically slanders it as an extension of bullying, and implying that it does no good what so ever and should be stopped. The purpose of this article is obviously to scare the fuck out of technophobe parents, who still think chat rooms are the biggest threat to their kids when they are online.
This article IS FUCKING BULLSHIT. I have never been so offended in all my life. Seriously. I have used Bebo and find it to be a good website, and you’re obviously seeing me use MySpace right now. “Bebo. It’s the talk of school runs”…wait, I haven’t heard anyone I know mention Bebo on the way to school or during school in the mornings. The article also points out that teenagers can hand out their MSN address or their own house address online. MSN is one thing, but to put your house address online is pretty stupid. If people actually listened to some of the helpful guides about on-line safety, then this mess wouldn’t occur. Whilst I wouldn’t agree with some of them, most are pretty spot on in their advice. The media seem to leap all over any craze young kids have and rip them apart for being “morally wrong” and just denounce it, whilst forgetting what kids are. We forget that there is a wide world out there. We are sheltered from the rest of the world through our naivety. Pokemon. Remember that? Remember all the negative press the media gave it? Do they forget that we are kids trying to have FUN? If a business makes a profit out of it, then more fool everybody else for not being clever/innovative/smart enough to think of the idea in the first place. Schools are trying to ban Bebo/MySpace…I can understand why and I sympathise with them. But the meaningless slandering of teenagers and teenage life in the press is absolutely ridiculous.
If you believe everything in the papers, then you’d actually believe that Tony Blair is the moral saviour of this country. You’d believe every teenager in the country stands outside corner shops with baseball bats and “hoodies” and are going to kill the Eastern European owner of the corner shop for his money and for fun. This is fucking crap.
I now understand why people don’t read newspapers. I came to the realisation not so long ago that the news is just the propaganda they want you to hear. Having watched V for Vendetta, which is a fantastic film and certainly raises many questions about the morality of this country and the way it’s run, it hammered it home a little bit. Reading this article today confirms it. At one point in my life, I honestly wanted to be a Journalist. I’m now embarrassed I even considered that as a career opportunity. The news is just the propaganda they want you to hear. I will not read a newspaper in the same light ever again. I will probably not even read a newspaper again in sheer disgust with the way the readership of a paper is treated.
There is a quote that is attributed to Aldous Huxley: “The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.” That’s very, very true.

This blog entry is just my opinion. You are more than welcome to critique it, hate me for it, or just hate me even more for it. But, I stand by it. Until the next time humanoids…Sounding Off…