Over the weekend, the internet's never-ending game of kick-the-idiot found its newest target: the handful of Kanye West fans who claimed they'd never heard of Paul McCartney.
"These Kanye West Fans Want To Know: 'Who Is Paul McCartney?'" writes the music editor at Buzzfeed. "These Kanye West Fans Don't Know Who Paul McCartney Is, Which Means All of Society Is Doomed," warn the apocalyptic prophets at E! Online. No less than five Good Morning America anchors spent three minutes hashing over the story on air.
All of those stories, which followed the release of McCartney's collaboration with Kanye on the single "Only One," are based on a foundational principle: Kanye West fans aren't familiar with Paul McCartney. At this point, it should be obvious to any journalist with even a smidge of good judgment that that principle is false. Of course Kanye West fans know who Paul McCartney is.
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One of the greatest hazards of Twitter is that it's a context-free medium. Any single message can be pulled from a feed of thousands of tweets, and blasted out to thousands of people — the vast majority of whom will be totally unfamiliar with the person who originally wrote it. If you just saw the half-dozen "Who is Paul McCartney?" tweets that were shared by so many websites, here are a few of the other tweets from those same users:
Yes, they were just joking. Of course they were. That should have been obvious from the beginning — but if it wasn't, 10 minutes spent scrolling through their Twitter feeds would have cleared it right up.
But even if the tweets were serious: why should anyone care whether a dozen random people, culled from Twitter's 284 million active users, have heard of Paul McCartney? Here's something that should give journalists at least a little pause: those jokers, who were generally tweeting to a few hundred followers, are now almost uniformly subject to mockery and death threats from strangers:
