“Is Social Media Creating Its Own Planet?” based on what people are talking about online this week.
In the category of “What planet are you on?” we’ve got a couple of doozies. First up, have you heard about the Notre Dame football star named Manti Te’o who is either the victim of a cruel hoax, or quite the hoax master himself?
Te’o either created a fictitious girlfriend who died during football season bringing on the sympathy big time (can’t hurt when you’re up for the Heisman Trophy), or met a woman who really was his girlfriend, except she wasn’t who she seemed. For the time being she has vanished – either in a car crash or from leukemia, or both.
Our second story in the “What planet are you on?” category is a more serious one. The Internet has always been a hotbed for conspiracy theorists, so we suppose it was only a matter of time before they got a hold of one our tragic mass school shootings and tried to debunk it.
A group of “truthers” have emerged in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting that claimed of the lives of 20 five- and six-year-olds and six of their teachers last month.
The truthers say this shooting didn’t happen. The children are all still alive (where exactly is not specified) and actors were hired to play the roles of first responders and parents.
- An American man working as a programmer outsourced his own job to Chinese workers who he paid a fraction of his salary while he went to the office each day and surfed the ‘net, watching a bucket load of cat videos.
- Actress Jodie Foster, long-rumored to be gay, didn’t exactly tear down any closet doors during a speech she made at the Golden Globes, but her rambling talk that managed to mention both Honey Boo Boo and Mel Gibson temporarily took the Twitterverse to another dimension.
- Attending events can be so all-consuming, sometimes you don’t have time to snap that Instagram, fire off tweets and update Facebook. Yet it’s so yesterday if you don’t make this happen in the moment. That’s why you need a social media butler to accompany you to your next big thing. That’s right, expect to see more low-budget versions of us social media types offering to document your every movement while you seemingly enjoy yourself as the world continues to turn throughout 2013.
Kathy Drasky regularly writes about online culture. Her marketing and communications work with the ANZA Technology Network, Advance Global Australians and with various Australians and Australian enterprises has led to at least a dozen trips Down Under.
An accomplished digital photographer, her photos have appeared in 7×7 Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle and Google Schmap.
