I’m always telling whoever will listen that for all its ‘Karley Sciortinos’ and ‘funny pictures’, Platform is essentially the death of ‘youth culture’, staged over ‘the internet’. What a vast and embarrassing backdrop that is, and how blindly Platform follows in the footsteps of V*CE. Don’t worry if you’re beginning to think that I might be making a point, this post says something odd about being allergic to semen at the end. And there are pictures, and a video. And some fashion stuff that we think is pretty cool, which we are going to point out online and then, like, yeah, whatever, wear it to a party.
Platform recently posted an article, as it is nearly the end of 2009 and the beginning of 2010, to point out, in true V*CE imitation fashion, the ’10 worst things about the noughties’. Whoever wrote it at times actually attempts to ‘make a point’ in his one or more of his rants that ‘isn’t totally ironic’. Like, irony is rubbish, and overused. Really? And apparently, also, blogs are bad, because they are saying nothing ‘new’ most of the time, or something. Thanks to the third person in the comments section for pointing out ‘hypocrisy’ in this idle and totally worthless criticism. Other things that apparently suck particularly badly include, um, Doctor Who, Piers Morgan, and (the bastardisation of) ‘indie’.
Do you know one rubbish thing from ‘the noughties’ that springs to mind reading that post?
OVER-INFORMED AND LAZY ‘CRITICS’
I think somewhere in the ‘blogosphere’ that is so maligned on Platform they are likened to the undead and called something like
ZOMBIES
but I might be missing the point.
One of the things that particularly sucks about the internet’s growth and the cult of the internet amongst young people, in particular, is exemplified pretty much anywhere you will find a comment box.
Wherever someone is given a chance to be a ‘critic’ about something, regarding which, because there is usually no qualification or validation pre-requisite to making a response on the BBC’s website, on YouTube, or on a blogpost, they will normally have no real or relevant awareness, you will get dumb responses.
So in the ‘blogosphere’ and, particularly, on websites like the BBC’s Have Your Say and YouTube, you will get an awful lot of comments that rage from simple flaming to total idiocy, via a lot of ill-advised attempts at irony. There are websites, like ‘speak you’re branes’, which thrive off this.
When the notion of unnecessary, brainless feedback becomes so overridingly popular – as in, when most of the nation is approaching ‘web-consciousness’ – people, i.e. the guys who took V*CE online, and the founders of similar websites elsewhere, including the British copycat Platform, will exploit this, to create a website based on ironic half-assed humourous observational criticism, e.g. ‘Well, that’s shit’.
Platform is an example of a website whose readers and journalists have been convinced that it needs to exist. Platform doesn’t need to exist. If it didn’t, its writers would go elsewhere, perhaps, or simply spend less time trying to be funny and trawling the internet for wacky things to write about. Its readers would spend more time on V*CE, or on their own blogs / flickrs / youtube accounts / whatever. It is an example of a website whereby the writers – as ever in hipster culture, the writers are merely the representatives of the ‘bloggers’ that they criticise – have a post writing for some ‘youth culture’ website, which they think means they are ‘informed’ and that their opinions are ‘relevant’, when, actually, neither of those things are true.
Platform’s writers, however funny the pictures might be, are zombies, and this article basically proves its own point, without being aware of doing so.
If you are going to be ironically self-deprecating, whilst attempting to actually criticise bloggers who have nothing to say, and to point out the flaw in the irony of the ‘noughties’ – in that it is a generation with ‘no punchline’ to its endless irony – then you are probably failing, if you don’t recognise that your own website is the exact epitomy of a void in youth culture, and of pointless regurgitation of uninformation.
Thanks for a rubbish article.
