Banal cavities

When I open up my Internet browser, eager to waste large chunks of my life watching YouTube videos of cats being surprised by things, the first site that fills my screen is the home page for Yahoo. I have no earthly idea why. Yahoo is a terrible site. It’s the kind of site I would direct people to if I wanted them to suffer from a violent epileptic seizure. Advertisements zip across the screen in the form of colorful animated graphics, and often when I click on what I think is the link to my mail, I click the ad instead and get directed to another terrible site; usually one that promises killer financing on a sport utility vehicle that looks like a melting plastic sculpture of Stonehenge.

It’s an obsessive-compulsive yearning for consistency that prevents me from choosing a better site for my start-up page. What adds to the torture is the news crawl in the middle of the screen that cycles through the latest trending articles. This news crawl is a depressing, dumbed-down version of what you’d see on a traditional newspaper’s front page. A front page organizes stories by what’s important; Yahoo organizes stories by what’s popular. And there’s rarely any overlap. Occasionally an item is both important and trendy, such as a piece about the president’s State of the Union address. But that’s usually because it provides anonymous browsers with a convenient forum for racist diatribes and rants about how Hitler was a brilliant painter. The comments section of these articles is like the Ku Klux Klan subdivision of hell.

Most of the popular stories, the ones that generate the highest traffic, fall into three categories: Celebrity news, hot dating tips, and viral videos of ferrets that dance to Van Halen’s “Jump.” The Internet, which promised the world a new means of global expression, has become a digital version of Cosmopolitan magazine.

It’s the celebrity news that bothers me the most, although to be fair, that’s not really a ‘Net thing – it’s just a thing. Has been for a while now, and I’ve never understood it. Have you ever seen Entertainment Tonight or Inside Edition? Hot tip: Don’t. Never before has there been such a dizzying parade of pointlessness. The idea behind celebrity journalism is that we should somehow care about a pop singer’s latest meltdown, or what fashions Best Actress nominees are sporting on the Oscars’ red carpet. As mild curiosities, these “news” items should occupy our attentions for no longer than it takes Charlie Sheen to flush a gram of coke down the toilet. Yet they now dominate headlines.

Sadly, public fixation on frivolity isn’t hard to understand. We’re all voyeurs, to an extent.

A few years ago, I was living in an apartment that towered over a shorter, squatter apartment building across a narrow driveway. As I was standing at my kitchen window, gazing out at the moon and being all writerly and deep, a flicker of movement below me caught my eye; I looked down at the apartment facing me and saw something so bizarre, I couldn’t register it at first: A man doing jumping jacks in his underwear. An extremely pale fellow (extremely pale), in tighty-whities, getting in some exercise at 10 o’clock at night. Immediately, I recognized this as a private moment that I shouldn’t linger on, and I did eventually pull my gaze away... but only eventually, because c’mon, it’s a dude doing jumping jacks in his underwear. It’s human nature to want to linger on such a weird spectacle.

That’s kind of what celebrity news is – a bizarre spectacle from which it’s hard to avert your eyes. And back when such news was limited to a half-hour of television per night, it was a simple thing to keep from getting too much of it in your diet. Just as it’s easy to not eat Snickers bars when you don’t keep any in the house, it’s easy to not give a second thought to Lindsay Lohan when she’s not constantly in your face.

And then the Internet happened. More specifically, sites like Yahoo, which figured out that candy generates more traffic than vegetables.

Like candy, a tiny bit of Hollywood gossip isn’t unforgivable. It’s easy entertainment, and has its place. That place, however, isn’t splattered across my computer screen. The fact that it’s cheap, and requires little effort on the part of the reader, has resulted in a populace that can more easily identify the Octomom than it can its own Secretary of State. This isn’t a skill I see coming in particularly handy, unless a terrorist cell captures you and tells you your release is dependent on whether you can provide her real name. (Hot tip #2: It’s Nadya  Suleman. I may have just saved your life.)

It’s not wrong to have heroes. I, for example, am a huge fan of Al Pacino – but because of his acting, not because he picked his nose at a Los Angeles Starbucks. The former is art, of a kind, and is worthy of attention when properly earned. The latter?

Well, the latter is just a guy doing jumping jacks in his underwear.