So the first thing you probably noticed was that I spelled glamour with a “u” more than once already. I like British spellings of many words, get over it.

“Online Glamour” seems to be the hot things these days. Due to the rise of online social networking and instant communication, especially thanks to the likes of Youtube, people who would otherwise have led anonymous lives and kept their peculiarities to themselves now can immediately record themselves doing something dangerous, insane, or outright stupid, post it online, and become massively well known throughout the online community.

But the big break doesn’t stop there. Eventually, said individuals will end up on the nightly news, at which time it becomes more “real.” Never forget, as important as the online world might be for people age 40 and under, many 40+ individuals still look at it as one of the new-fangled contraptions of the ever expending boundaries of technology and thus consider it beneath them. But these people do watch the nightly news, so naturally this comes of a certain kind of reality to them once it hits that point.

So this sounds great! Anyone can be a star! Hurray for MySpace (or myspace or however you spell it!) and Youtube!

...until you hit the dark side of it all, the dismal reality that most of the popular people online are only popular because they’re making jack-asses out of themselves and people are laughing at them. Note, I say laughing at them, not with them.

Furthermore, having a million viewers on Youtube doesn’t actually make you cool in the eyes of the majority of people if you’re really an idiot- instead, it means that our culture has actually come to the point of breaking down, and people are so bored with reality that they don’t know what to with themselves except watch any lame thing they come across.

Second, there’s the part about the shameless self-promotion, also known as Cyber-Whoring. Some people just have a good idea (or an incredibly stupid one, or in the rare instance, a funny one), and the idea catches on with a little advertisement. Others, however, spend countless hours a day working towards getting adds on myspace and so on and so forth.

Can I just say...guilty?

Okay, well, I’m kind of guilty. Maybe for a week or so I did that, and I do submit my blogs to search engines and such. Then again, I actually have something worthwhile to say - I don’t just provide entertainment, I provide education and provoke depth of thought. Big difference.

Back to the griping- some of these people actually do such a bad job that someone from Hollywood offers them a movie deal, a record deal, a book deal, or whatever. They enter the world of entertainment and get paid lots of money.

So wait. We pay people who provide mere mindless entertainment millions of dollars, but people who actually contribute to the overall cultural well-being and progression get paid in crappy peanuts? What’s the matter here?

Basically, we’ve taken the Court Jesters of our era and made them into miniature gods, while divorcing ourselves from any sense of genuine spirituality and good-will towards other humans, as evidenced by the rise in the idiot fundamentalist Christian population.

When it all comes down to it and the culture collapses and all civilization as we know it end, do we really want the anthropologists and archeologists in the year equivalent to 7000 CE to cite Britney Spears and Chris Crocker as being the epitome of the world we knew?

Too many smart-asses have already answered yes to that question.

As usual, I’ll stay in the minority and say no.

You would think in the world of online resources, instant communication, and social networking sites that allow for the creation of a personal online shrine to oneself that the epitome of online knowledge, Wikipedia, would allow for something similar- a creation of a page about, well, yourself.

Unfortunately, after registering, I discovered that this is not true.

Not only can you not create an article about yourself no matter how noteworthy your blogs may be on MySpace, you can also not cite blogs as references - they need “reliable resources.”

Uh, excuse me? So the thousands of blogs of informed writers around the country on top of the thousands upon thousands of blogs posted daily (hourly?) from around the world recording first-hand experiences and eye-witness accounts don’t resonate as “reliable resources”?

You know what? I smell a crock - and it’s bubbling.

Now, I know the essence of such a policy actually reflects the need to not have every Tom, Dick, and Harry running around, creating an article about themselves in the online encyclopedia. What bothers me, though, is that if you don’t have an official website otherwise (or else are at least present in the general public eye), you’re up a crappy creek with no paddle, ladies and gents.

So to this I say: Wikipedia, one day you will regret not featuring an article on Peachy Keen Stevo.

For the rest of you, you can check out my blog at MySpace. Atomic Froth contains a wide variety of things- and you’ll see why Wikipedia should want me!