Beate:

Stupidity in the cyber age

By Robert J. Holt, The Uniter (University of
Winnipeg)

WINNIPEG (CUP)—Once, in elementary school, a
friend of mine was sitting by himself in a corner of
the playground, pouting. I walked over and asked
what was wrong.

“T hate people,” he
responded, looking at
the ground.

“Why?” I asked.

He lifted his head,
looked me right in the eyes, and shouted, “Because
people are stupid!”

Recently, I’d been having the same thought
whenever I went online. Whether watching a
video on YouTube of some sub-normal jackass
from South Carolina jumping on his best friend’s
crotch or reading barely-literate status updates on
Facebook, I got the feeling that people aren’t just
stupid. No, the whole human species is getting
more idiotic by the keystroke.

It was a depressing thought, but I’ve started
to see things differently. It’s not that people are
getting any dumber. It’s that, thanks to the advent
of social media, people are more honest about how

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- ‘The lap dance in question

dumb they actually are. They can come clean and
let the whole world know.

For example, take that teacher from a
Winnipeg high school that decided it was a bright
idea to perform a lap dance on his colleague in a
gym full of students. Was that dumb? Fantastically

It’s not that people are getting any dumber. It’s that, thanks to the advent of social media,
people are more honest about how dumb they actually are.

so. Everybody in the place knew it was dumb and
everyone who saw it on the news thought it was
dumb. Really, really dumb.

A decade ago, only a handful of people would
have known about this — the people in the gym,
the parents and the school board. Rumours would
spread to schools nearby, but it would essentially be
a local issue.

However, thanks to YouTube and a high school
student with a cell phone (I understand that’s fairly
common these days), the lunchtime lap dance
story blew up like gangbusters. It received global
attention; the video was featured on the front page
of CNN’s website. It’s a safe bet that neither of

 

the teachers in the video will ever be hired by any
school division with a working knowledge of how
to use Google.

If there’s a moral to their story, it’s this:
nowadays, if (and when) you do something stupid,
people are going to find out.

Personally, I think
that’s great. I’m looking
forward to a future
when the members of
this generation start
running for public office
and.the photos from their youth begin to surface.
Smear politics will be that much more fun. Or
maybe they’ ll just disappear entirely. After all, if
everyone has dirt on everyone else, no one can
really claim the moral high ground.

The point is, if you’re ever crawling the web—
that wondrous series of tubes—and you start to feel
like the world is getting dumber, just remember that
my grade school friend has been right all along.
People aren’t getting any stupider; we were plenty
stupid to begin with.

We’re simply getting better at admitting it.