Social Media: What is it Really – Threat or Menace?

May 30, 2012

And hey, Charley, I think about you
Every time I pass a fillin’ station
On account of all the grease
You used to wear in your hair

I’m a social media skeptic and find it hard to fathom the valuations of the giants in this arena. So, of course, I’m attracted to the disconfirming story. Like the one that Olga Kharif reports on in Bloomberg Business Week, “Lifejacking’: Spammers Hit Social Media.”

How about a guy who sells anti-spam software claiming that 40% of the accounts on the social media titans Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest are created by spammers? So says Mark Risher, CEO of Impermium, who knows about a company that has just the right solution for your self-diagnosed problem.

I just wished there’d been some effort to independently source his 40% estimate.

I used to live across the street from a barber shop on Ninth Street, right above a dirty bookstore off Euclid Avenue, and the owner there thought 85% of the men he saw in the street needed a haircut.

As one commenter asked: Can you imagine how many megawatts are wasted every day in server farms all across the world handling all of this social media crap? Why aren’t the climate-commies, green-weenies and Occupy pukes protesting that?

Don’t sugar-coat it, pal. Tell us how you really feel. This is in the grand old comedy tradition created by Steve Allen, who would read particularly incensed letters from the New York Daily News in the 1950s and 1960s. The construction of “climate-commie, green-weenie, Occupy pukes” is just masterful.

If I had written it I would have gone more rhythmically with “greenie-weenies” and that would have been a bridge too far, certainly.

And I still have that record
of Little Anthony & the Imperials
But someone stole my record player
Now how do you like that?

Or, for your consideration, from the site Guyism, the slide show 7 Ways You Didn’t Realize the Internet Was Eating Your Privacy. I think this is info that’s not just for guys.

And let’s not even mention Henry Ford and his 1920 publication, The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem. “If fans wish to know the trouble with American baseball, they have it in three words—too much Jew,” wrote Henry Ford on May 22, 1920. I guess he’d like the current line-up better? It’s certainly not dominated by the Sons of Abraham.

I said, let’s not even mention that!

 

 

 

 

 

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