My father was an amateur hoarder. He kept so many things we had to alphabetize our basement shelves simply to catalog the clutter. The floors, which were not cataloged, were even cluttier.
One Christmas, my mother presented him with a non-too-subtle gift: a Shop Vac that also happened to be waterproof, so he could address the puddling in the basement. If I recall, Dad fired it up exactly zero times. But the gift amply delivered the message: the basement shit needs cleaning.
I would tease mom about the romantic gesture for years, but now I see the behavior has shifted into American politics, just without the utility, need or clear messaging.
I’m speaking of the Peloton, a $2,245 exercise bike that is suddenly consuming megabytes and media space. The bike commercial, set to Tal Bachman’s 1999 one-hit wonder She’s So High, tells the tale of a husband who buys his wife a Peloton for Christmas. She seems completely surprised — she apparently hadn’t cycled before — and takes videos of her fitness journey, eventually premiering it for her spouse. “A year ago, I didn’t realize how much this would change me,” she says in the end.
The holiday ad for the luxury stationary bike company was released online in November. But this week, it supposedly took the digital world by storm and was hate-tweeted into virality. But both the online reaction and media coverage were conjured from the ether — and underpin a larger problem in politics and civil interaction.
We had a rule at the paper: one is an occasion; two is a coincidence; and three is a trend (and therefore worthy of a story). Look through any paper (or most TV news shows, for that matter), and you’ll see outlets straining for that third example to justify the piece’s existence.
Sadly, that already-tenuous rule of thumb has transferred from print to digital. And the cross-pollination of media has been catastrophic. Papers have already adopted the internet’s viewer count and click bait strategies, with tragic results: A new study by the University of North Carolina shows that since 2004, one in five daily newspapers in the nation have shuttered.
And the journalistic principles that one held governance have lost all grip. We cover the president’s tweetrants like fireside chats. We quote anonymous Twitter users. We have developed a new news arithmetic: One tweet is the internet noticing; two tweets is ‘internet backlash;’ and three tweets is the internet fully ablaze.
And Pelaton became tinder on a dry California afternoon, by media measures. Don’t believe it? Consider the Pelaton “backlash.” Several outlets, in print and on television, ran the same two tweets. The first was this Twitter image, a riff on a hostage horror film:
The second was this Twitter post:
Siraj Hashmi
Nothing says “maybe you should lose a few pounds” like gifting your already rail thin life partner a Peloton
2,466 people are talking about this
I couldn’t help but notice that both postings were written by men. Isn’t that a violation of the American Woke Policy? And already, the fabricated backlash has become a real one: Peloton’s stock dropped 10% last week over the perceived outrage.
This is the Left eating itself. This is offense-hunting. When we liberals wonder how the hell the president can coalesce a legion of followers, the hegemony of the cult cannot be underestimated. While the Right’s rejection of factual evidence puts the slippery in slope, the Left seems eager to yank the rudder just as dramatically port.
Therefore, the HB is suggesting an amendment to its Limited Twitter Policy (which calls for less coverage of what Trump sausage-pecks and more of what his administration actually enacts). In short, the amendment is this: Twitter has a character-count limit of 280 keystrokes. Stories about Twitter should be limited to the same length. After all, how many words do you need to tell readers “People are tweeting about this?”
Our over-inflation of the importance of social media is nearly as destructive as the foreign manipulation of it. The internet is the fire of 20th Century. If we’re not using it to cook the food that expands our gray matter — and instead use it to create political folly where there is none — we are just spinning our wheels.
