Yes, I know. It's a pessimistic title. But in the last two weeks, my faith in humanity (especially that portion of humanity that is younger than me) has been severely eroded.
You see, I just recently started yet another random part time job, to complement the work with the bitchy blond girls (who now seem more dumb and annoying than actually bitchy) and the occasional temp gig I pick up. My new part-time job is working for a social networking website, kind of like MySpace but not. I'm not going to name names.
My job is two-fold. First, I remove images and videos that are inappropriate (i.e., pornographic, or containing nudity, excessive violence, or foul language). Secondly, I respond to users who want to know why they've been flagged for inappropriate behavior. So basically, I look up all the things they've been flagged for and summarize for them why they were flagged.
I've only been doing this for two weeks, and I am already completely appalled and horrified. These kids (because I'm sure the average age of the site can't be more than 15 or 16) are so mean to each other. They gang up on each other. They say horrible, nasty things to each other. I've never seen so much swearing, and sexually explicit (and often violent) language, and racial slurs, and straight out hate speech.
And then there's the spelling and grammar. If the above weren't appalling enough, then I'm also faced with the fact that apparently, no one under the age of 20 knows how to spell, or how to use a comma or a period, or voice a thought that is even remotely coherent. And here I had hoped that the education system wasn't as defunct as I feared. . . .
When I was in school, we studied political philosophy. I don't remember much about it, honestly, but I remember having to read Thomas Hobbes. I always thought that Thomas Hobbes seemed like such a gloomy pessimist--the premise of his book The Leviathan is, after all, that men are inherently brutish and bent on destroying one another. That seemed kind of bleak when I was 20 years old.
But now, after only 2 weeks of managing inappropriate user content, I think Thomas Hobbes nailed it on the head. If the kids on this website are any indication, then the life of man (and woman) is indeed "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
2 comments:
Hi - I'm a friend of Miranda, and was following the links to various blogs, and read yours. I wanted to comment that people over the age of 20 have a difficult time with grammar, as well. I grade college papers written by 18-56 year olds. Run-on sentences are the rule. . .
yeah, it's like no one learned the rules about semicolons and commas + conjunctions. That makes me crazy. I just finished reading The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory, and she is the queen of run-on sentences. And she's definitely old enough to know better!
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