EverythingAlmost.com

Now, any error you make can be posted on social media. Did you accidentally grab the diesel handle from the gas station? That’s going up on Twitter. Tried to walk into the exit doors at Trader Joe’s? This could make it Instagrammable.

While I’m not one to take a political angle for something like this, I do wonder why we care so much that President Joe Biden doesn’t know how to read a teleprompter. It doesn’t matter which political party you are, I find it odd that people love to make fun of each other.

Recently, Biden read a speech and he mistakenly said “end of quote, repeat the line” which was intended to be a prompt for him to repeat something he said earlier.

Here’s one mocking tweet with a video that shows the gaffe:

Here’s another sarcastic tweet:

It’s funny, but does it mean the entire world order is now going to crumble?

It is unlikely.

Are you sure he isn’t a complete clown wearing a three-piece suit and a three piece shirt?

Not at all.

I’ve used a teleprompter before, and it’s not always easy to keep up. If you pause or skip over a section, you can quickly get befuddled, and there’s no way to tell someone to stop scrolling.

I’m not defending him. It’s absurd, as I already said.

What I’m wondering about most is why we jump on social media so quickly about things like this. Everyone is currently in public and we continue to debate the merits our public performance. What’s the worst? There’s always an angle. If there’s a statement, or a gaffe, or a tweet, or any other public discourse of any kind, social media has made it possible to “expose” things we don’t like or don’t agree with.

In essence, social media have become clickbait in a compacted form to let us shout about our causes in microcosmic doses.

It reminds me of how cable news channels started saying “breaking news” so often that just about every piece of news was “breaking” in the end. We stopped watching all the news eventually. (CNN recently announced they won’t do this as oftenThank you.

I’m currently reading a book about Watergate and, let’s be honest, this is nothing new. Each minor detail in the scandal was covered by news media at that time. What’s changed is that we are now all reporting these incidents to each other. It’s all noise. To keep up on every scandal or minor development, you’d have to stay on social media all day long.

And that’s exactly what we do, and that’s exactly what the social media companies want.

It begs the question: Who are the clowns?