Let's talk about Justin Beiber

  Do you have something to say about him?  Just make up something and the media will eat it like sheep in a pasture eat grass.  What is disturbing for those who don't much care what the young Beiber fellow does is the power of the media to influence.  We are constantly barraged by stories, the more sensational the better.  Even though we don't care in the slightest about a certain scenario depicted by the media, we tend to believe it; it's a type of mass brainwashing. It's more serious than we might think because we're unaware of what the truth may be.  The spreading of so-called information is intensified by the fact that if a story is picked up, on internet or television, it's not from a single  source.  Every venue hops aboard, not wanting to be left out of what seems to be a juicy inside look at those in the spotlight. 
     For example, you may not have any interest in the adolescent or theatrical behaviors of a young man named Justin Beiber.  But he's "newsworthy" and if you hear a story about him from every channel on TV, zillions of FB posts, and countless references by daytime hosts and latenight comedians, you will probably believe it:  Justin Beiber outraged a  neighborhood in Atlanta, and was the subject of picketers who did not welcome his buying a house there.  We all heard that, and even saw the picketers outside the house he was purportedly going to buy.  Media havoc ensued.  Except, it turns out, that it was all a hoax, perpetrated by some yahoo of a disc jockey or radio station host.  The story was plucked out of the air, the lie made out of whole cloth, as it were.  J.B. had never seen the alleged house, or even been in the town.  The picketers were hired to flesh out the hoax.  Fact checkers do not exist, it seems, when in hot pursuit of ratings.  Do you wonder how much else that we're subjected to (not unwillingly, to be sure), likewise lacks veracity?
    In the novel and film "Life of Pi," the reader/viewer is left to determine (within the framework of a work of fiction, of course) which of the two versions of events that the narrator reveals actually happened: only one narrative can be true: the other is a lie, or an illusion.  We live now, in that type of society, with very little firsthand knowledge of the thousands upon thousands of sound and sight bites streamed to us on a daily basis. 
     I've got to go spend my store of Bitcoins now.  I'm not sure if they're real or not, but according to all I've heard they are very valuable.  Or else completely worthless.  I only hope my investment in them doesn't cost me my house.