The Internet can do a great many things these days from letting you and your friends solve your ongoing arguments by searching for answers while at the same time helping you study for tests for school. The practical advantages of the Internet number in the hundreds and that's a very conservative number. But it's done something else unexpected: It's launched the career of Justin Bieber.
Justin Bieber is a 17 year old boy from Canada who likes Wayne Gretzky and looking like a lesbian. Oh wait he got a new haircut…looks at it…still looks like a lesbian. He's loved by teenie boppers the world over for what I'm not exactly sure. Combine him and the JoBros with a little Selena Gomez and a dash of Miley and you get the closest thing to the anti-Christ that we have on this world today. But that's not the issue at hand; it's that the Internet and technology are solely responsible for this meteoric rise.
The Internet, through sites like TMZ and YouTube, have shed light on embarrassing celebrity moments and given you as much access as you could possibly desire into their lives off camera. People in the 1940s didn't care what Clark Gable and Orson Welles did off camera; as long as they were making something awesome, the people were in. For all they knew, Birth of a Nation was D.W. Griffith's life story. But these stars today, thanks to a combination of the 24 hours news cycle and the Internet, have every aspect of their lives on display.
This is the reason most kids these days don't want to work to be famous. They see people like Bieber who became famous for reasons unknown and seemed to only then release music. They see Charlie Sheen's profile raised exponentially after giving a series of incoherent interviews about bi-winning to multiple media outlets. They see the abortions that are the Kardashians who are only famous for Kim's sex tape. Blah.
Bieber's twitter account has millions of followers. I'm not going to link to it on the off chance that you become one of those people who follow his thoughts and give them the collective weight of the Magna Carta and the Treat of Versailles combined. He even said former NHL goaltender Kevin Weekes was cool and linked to his twitter. What happened next? Thousands followed Weekes. The child essentially has an army of 12 year old girls at his disposal.
There were teen idols in the past such as the Beatles and Elvis but their personal thoughts and preferences weren't known to the public. You didn't know who they were kissing or what they were doing or who they thought was radical. They just sang. Aside from Bieber's movie that recently came out to a sickeningly high number and "Baby Boy" which is a horribly homoerotic title, Bieber seems to have done nothing of notice. And both of those things came out after he was already famous.
The Disney hype machine, orchestrating its efforts through TV, social media and whatever other Internet mediums they could employ, introduced Bieber to his soon to be army of 12 year old teenie boppers. Then he somehow became famous. For what? I don't know, but that's not the point. At least it's better than being launched by a sex tape like Kim and Paris. Sigh.
The Internet can do some terrible things in the world like make Justin Bieber's birthday a trending topic on Twitter but you also have to look at the positives. There's stuff like Hipster Hitler, Peatman's Pals, Cracked, College Humor, Twitter (not involving Biebers'), Facebook, viral videos and whatever else you can think of. There's so much random stuff out there. There's What If Sports, Wikipedia, Ask Jeeves, Gmail, Google, online classes and hundreds of other things.
We should just be thankful that we have stuff like that even if the side effects include Justin Bieber and all these people who just are famous for being dumbasses. Sometimes you have to take the good with the bad I guess. And I think we've gotten more good than anything else. What would we do without KSK Rex Ryan, Brett Favre's pictures, Uniwatch, Amazon, Fantasy Sports, ESPN.com and everything else.
Justin Bieber may be infecting out world with his potential brand of stupidity. He's a Maple Leafs fan for chrissakes. That's how you know he's dumb and wants to inflict his pain on the rest of us. But we'll brush him aside like all the other fads and live on. Soon he will go away. Soon it will be our Independence Day!
