Week 2 - The Wit and Wisdom of Brad Paisley

First of all, I would have liked to embed the topic of discussion, the Brad Paisley video "Online", on this page, but the parent company of his label BMG doesn't allow embedding of their YouTube videos. This was a source of endless frustration to me during my music blogging days, considering one would imagine the point of putting the video online would be to expose the song and artist as widely as possible, but that doesn't seem to be the plan over at BMG. Well played, giant clueless conglomerate!

Back to the main topic at hand, the video, which can be seen here (if you're interested), approaches humorously a phenomenon that nearly anyone who has had any experience with the Internet is familar with. Long story short: someone on the Internet isn't who they say they are. I'd have to imagine this isn't an entirely new phenomenon (I'm sure there were pen pals out there who engaged in exaggeration, or maybe even telegraphs from hot nineteen year old blondes to lonely gold miners), and for certain the art of the hoax goes back at least as far as Jacob holding wool over his arm to trick his father into delivering the familial blessing to the wrong son, but the hypereality of the Internet does allow for the creation of alternate personae to a much greater extent. While in the Paisley video this is played for laughs (the band geek eventually realizes love was just across the street all along), in real(er) life, the stakes can be much larger, as "trolling" has reached destructive and occasionally fatal height. Several years ago, Jason Fortuny ran a scam on Craigslist drawing in men with a "Casual Encounters" promising a sexual encounter. Fortuny then posted the responses he received on the Internet embarrassing those drawn in by his ruse. More tragically, in the case of Megan Meier, a teenage girl committed suicide after being taunted by an adult neighbor and her friends who created a fake Myspace profile to lure the girl in. There's a very real extent to which no one who you meet on the Internet can be trusted, regardless of the context, which must creep over into the rest of our lives. Who can be trusted when there are multiple playing fields of engagement, all with different rules and standards?

This reminded me of the double edged sword of progress that Neil Postman alludes to in chapters two and three of Technopoly. To the extent that anyone who dares question the overwhelming positive nature of technological advances is dismissed as a "Luddite", our society has by and large decided that all technology is good, all the time, which clearly isn't the case. While a five minute long country music video doesn't begin to address the ramifications of this crisis of identity, what does it mean for society when people can change like chameleons at will, some to have fun, but some with malicious intent? When we have masks for every different forum, do we lose track of who we actually are?