I‘ve submitted my fair share of cheesy essays and inflated resumes during high school and college to try to get scholarships. But something tells me that as the cost of college tuition keeps going up to ridiculous amounts, kids are going to start making stranger and more desperate attempts to get help (in the form of money). Especially because people are morons to begin with.
I say this because tonight I surfed through some blogs I've previously referred to as the “most average thing possible.”
And this is one I came across: “You + Reading This = My shot at a $1000 Video Scholarship on YouTube”
In it is a high school girl's plea for you to give up 1 minute of your life that you could've used to masturbate, to watch her video (it's at the end of this blog post – don't watch it yet), so she can amass more YouTube views than any other video entry, so she can win a $1000 scholarship from ScholarshipPoints.com.
The video is hard to watch because it's terrible, but even harder because it's not intentionally so, or for the sake of irony or absurdity. It's like watching The Steve Wilkos Show.
And this is the type of material going on all over YouTube (or as most people know it, “the video internet”). It's the reason MySpace continues to dominate Facebook in overall users, to everyone's disbelief. This is “Middle America Using the Internet, For Real,” and it makes it easier to understand things like George Bush.
Let's break down the evolution of this girl's (Tiffany's) video as a microcosm of how shitty content is recycled until it clogs the internet, making Google a richer company:
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ScholarshipPoints.com wants to advertise itself, but can't figure out how to be trendy.
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ScholarshipPoints.com figures that to be trendy, you must first make a video admitting that you aren't trendy (be sure to include fake failed attempt at being trendy!), then recruit people to be trendy for you (classic case of new age reverse corporate psychology gone horribly wrong).
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Tiffany makes horrible video advertising ScholarshipPoints.com – less content involved than ScholarshipPoints.com's video asking for this video.
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Tiffany blogs about horrible video, asking for people to waste time watching it merely so she can accumulate views (notice the goal is not to watch the video itself, just to increase a counter – so things have deteriorated into a motivational clickfest).
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I read her blog and watch her video.
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I blog about her blog and watching her video.
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You read my blog about her blog and watch her video.
And stuff like that is why people spend hours at a time on the internet getting dumber – call it “viral video” if you want, but that doesn't make it cool. It's why chain letters and pyramid schemes still exist. It's why there are 6 of the same 3-judge (1 British, 1 loud, 1 rational) reality competition shows on TV. It's why you can't be yourself in front of girls. It's why the Twin Towers fell.
It's why you can't help but watch this video!
THIS earns you a scholarship these days?? Are you kidding me? The only thing this should earn you is a free piano lesson, a full bag of groceries, and a bat to the head.