Over the past sixteen hours GrodsCorp has been blessed by a couple of visits by its number one fan, Timmeh Blair. Timmeh kindly came out of obsessive lurker mode to point out some apostrophe errors in my post about apostrophe errors on the Hungry Jack’s Facebook page. I humbly claimed the errors and thanked Timmeh for his help. But it must be a sad night at Chateau Blair, with no good shows on the telly, when Timmeh has nothing better to do than that.

(By the way, Timmeh leaves comments under his first name only — and the ’shift’ key must be stuck — without a link back to his own blog. This surely isn’t because he wants to try and stop his minions back home from finding out that he pays more attention to blog opponents than he does to them. Surely.)

But imagine my surprise when I checked the rather newish GrodsCorp group on Facebook this morning and saw this.

Look a bit closer.

Awww, shucks. Isn’t that sweet? As Toaf said last night about Timmeh: “He wubs his Grods.”

So I was checking my Facebook this morning when I saw this advertisement.

A more desperate and pitiful excuse for a corporation, with less sense of brand building, I’ve never seen — I mean, they can’t even write “flame grilled Whopper” proper

A couple of days ago Bridgit exclusively revealed the shittest advertisement ever made, advertising the shittest promotion ever promoted, and now it seems that Hungry Jack’s is also begging people to become “fans” of a shitty fast food chain on Facebook. I simply had to check it out so I clicked on the ad, expecting to see an abandoned corner in the wastelands of Facebook, but was horrified to see…

…1,952 fans!!!!1!

I’m genuinely shocked. How can somebody’s life be so devoid of meaning that they find themselves pledging their fandom of a fast food chain publicly? How? But then again, clicking on a button to become a “fan” of something on Facebook takes one movement of the hand, a fraction of a second, and barely a moment’s thought. These people would probably sign up as “fans” and then forget about it. They certainly wouldn’t go to the pathetic effort of actually writing anything on the Hungry Jack’s page, would they?

By clicking submit on your comment about a fast food chain you agree that you are a loser with no life

They would. Anastasia, Krystie (sic) and “Utegirl”, you should be ashamed of yourselves.

And the orthographic Nazi in me just can’t help pointing out the double-barreled apostrophe error on the chain’s super-exciting photo gallery page.

Hungry Jack’s: FAIL.

The other day I was having a conversation about one of those moral panic issues — you know, things like binge drinking, drugs, emos etc. Anyway, I listened to the other person panicking for a while, nodding patiently, before I said (very tongue in cheek) “I blame the internet.” Only problem is that the other person didn’t think it was a joke and agreed entirely. You see, for many people civilisation as we know it began to crumble the moment pr0n started being transfered digitally over phone lines instead of on glossy paper in newsagents.

When my students are doing research assignments and I ask for their sources at least half of them write down “Google” or “the internet”, causing me to go off on yet another angry rant about how Google and the tubes are tools to locate resources rather than resources in their own right. But I guess when supposedly intelligent adults can’t differentiate between tools, the content that tools communicate, or the intent and behaviour of the tools’ users, then why should I expect kids to tell the difference?

A classic example today from the allegedly intelligent adults responsible for running our country.

THE Rudd Government has admitted its high-speed broadband network could lead to an increase in cyber-bullying and other online crimes against children.

This shit moves me to tears of frustration. As Craig said to me in an SMS about this article this morning, “Maybe we should leave the tubes exactly the way they are? That will protect Teh Children.” On the one hand I know that the government wants to be seen to be tough on cyber-bullying and that necessitates a certain level of Today Tonight-style reactionary populism, but on the other hand it makes me despair when our government stoops to such anti-intellectual and anti-sense statements such as that one.

But then again, what choice does the government have when the media just adore whipping up the public into fits of moral panic about the internet and its emo-inducing ways? Every time there’s a case of bullying in schools that’s taken place (wholly or in part) on an internet website the popular media launches into its “the internet/ MySpace/ YouTube/ MSN/ mobile phones are evil” argument. But bullying has always been in schools, it will always (unfortunately) be in schools, and whether it takes place behind the bike sheds or on an internet chat room it’s the bullying that’s the problem and not the medium through which it occurs.

However, it’s important to note that the media, politicians and other organisations with influence don’t always run the tubes=evil line. Sometimes it’s just a total lack of understanding about what the internet is and what it does, resulting in a smack-your-head-it’s-so-stupid kind of reaction.

A couple of months ago when I was preparing to hold a school-based Australia 2020 summit to feed into the main summit I received a primer booklet from the government to help prepare kids for the topics being discussed. At the bottom of each section there was a list of resources to assist in lesson planning. Listed in each section were some books and government department websites, along with the words “blogs” and “wikis”. Not a list of specific blogs and wikis that had information relevent to the topic; just those two words because some clueless dipshit in the education ministry had some vague notion of Web2.0 and had heard that tha kidz like to use blogs.

In the lead up to last year’s election both major parties “embraced” so-called new media in an effort to connect with younger voters. As John Howard viciously discovered, simply using new media tools such as YouTube will not change consumers’ minds about the quality of your content. And setting up a Facebook profile as a tool for connecting with voters is useless unless you know how to use it and what to communicate through it.

Even religion — smarting from the way that younger generations are beginning to turn away in droves — is embarrassing itself by attempting to use technological tools to reconnect with tha kidz. The Catholic Church has well and truly entered the 1990s by discovering the power of mobile phone SMS. They have been sending text messages to worshippers in the false hope that using semi-literacy for Bible passages will bring them instant cred.

But I suppose the internet and the internet ignorant have one thing in common: they’re both tools.

I’m not known for Internet fads. Everyday I recieve many emails along the lines of “Kevin Rudd has added you to his Facebook. Would you like to join?”

The answer is, of course, shit no. I would barely even have heard of FaceBook if it wasn’t for The Age - a quick Google search of their domain reveals 525 hits for “FaceBook”.

Are these Age journalists really that enthralled by a fairly popular social networking site that they deem it news 525 times? It is of no surprise to find that not one of these news stories was even of the slightest importance. No “Osama found in Facebook offices”, no “Facebook spills oil along Alaskan coast”, not even a “Facebook deems itself President For Life”.

So why the interest?

Any theories?