No, Mr Milne didn’t write this.
Late last night, just before climbing the wooden hill to Sleepyville, I was having a brief-but-deep conversation with the missus about the usual: how utterly stupid the world appears to be. Like, how most of the people of Europe seem hell-bent on buggering up the EU; how a huge portion of everybody seems to think that Hugo Chavez was a Good Bloke; how Hilary Mantel – having written a sensitive, intelligent and thought-provoking piece on the royal family – had it turned on its head and inside out by so-called journalists so that she attracted the wrath of half the planet – led by the perfectly-uninformed leaders of all three UK political parties; how the future ex-prime minister of Slovenia is getting away with things that would make Berlusconi blush… you know: the usual current bollocks.
And then quoth the raven-haired one, “But what is it that makes everyone so stupid?”
“The Internet.”
I just said it, without the tiniest hesitation. And then it dawned on me: it’s actually true.
I was going to write about it here (but was already trepidatious, on account of the obvious problem of using the very medium against which I wanted to rail), and very nearly did, until I couldn’t be arsed.
But just now I checked my email and there was yet another little digi-packet of Wisdom-Lite, lovingly planted in my inbox, sent by a friend via the syrupy Sun Gazing website. And here I am, back on track, railing. The piece of digital bog paper in question was a Pooh-quote from A A Milne, distributed by my friend and doubtless countless others, as some sort of homeopathetic fluff-message plus a plea to ‘like’ and ‘share’. Now, I’m sure that way back in the mists (or smog – London in the fifties) of time when I read Winnie the Pooh, given that I was a child, it was a children’s book and therefore seemed to be appropriate reading material, I absorbed Pooh and Piglet’s brief interchange on the spelling of ‘love’ and filed it away as one of the Lego blocks upon which I was building my way towards adulthood. And now I’m an adult, the rest of you appear to be still playing with Lego.
OK, so how does the Internet get the blame for making you all stupid?
Or, a better question: while growing up, did anyone ever say to you, “Don’t believe everything you read”?
What that really means folks, is that you should question everything around you, until you are satisfied that both you and the person who wrote it knows what you’re talking about.
See, back in the day, there was the phenomenon of The Bloke in the Pub: if you were questioned about some daft bit of stuff you were spouting, and you could only come up with, “But that’s what so-and-so said” – you knew you had maybe swallowed a whole red herring. The internet is mostly populated by Blokes in the Pub, from whom we are picking up all kinds of nonsense without bothering to check that there is a factual basis.
Just to illustrate, here are some questions (please answer them truthfully):
- Can you name the main institutions of the EU and describe their relationship with each other?
- Can you show just one factual, verifiable piece of evidence that Jesus Christ existed?
- Do you know the difference between a budget deficit and a national debt?
- Do you know what the core product is on Facebook?
- Do you know what Sandi Toksvig actually wrote about Kate Middleton?
- … and what Hilary Mantel wrote about her (and have you read any of her books)?
- Do you know that you only need to have the memory of intelligence to believe in homeopathy?
The thing is, you can actually find this information on the Internet, among the kittens, vacuous sayings presented over ‘sensitive’ images, meme dance crazes, what some daft bugger has done in Russia, adorable marriage proposals and the rest of the gloop.
I must confess I am partial to the dance crazes, but: I can answer all of those questions – which means I can’t have a useful conversation with most of you.
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