The mindlessness of Miley and Apple outrage

ANOTHER day, another step forward in the inexorable march towards mediocrity and mindlessness.

Case in point: Two of the biggest public freak-outs this past week were the ongoing fallout from Miley Cyrus’s tongue-twirling twerk-a-thon and, on the opposite extreme of the absurdity scale, the fracas over Apple’s new IOS7 release.

At first glance these things may have little in common, but the hyperventilation each brought on in fans and detractors alike are but ditties from the same hymn sheet.

First up Miley. As ridiculous and embarrassing as her VMA performance was, and as unsavoury (and unhygienic) as her licking of the steel chains and the iron ball in her new music video continues to be, what part of “self-promotion” don’t we understand?

Miley is, if nothing else, a tacky little product with a looming sell-by date, which pretty astute people with big calculators are marketing as if their lives depended on it (which they probably do, monetarily and figuratively speaking).

Getting you, the outraged and disgusted consumer, to take to Twitter and Facebook and the office restroom to rant about how outraged and disgusted you are is in itself the end objective of all that writhing and licking.

So congratulations, you just contributed to making Miley’s by-all-accounts rather mediocre album number one in the charts, and her little twerking tush the most talked-about derriere in the universe.

Of course, if you really wanted to register your disgust, the better option would have been to give it the attention it deserves – which is exactly zero. No album sales or Rolling Stone cover, no twerking or licking, and we can all get on with our twerk-free lives.

Ditto Apple.For more than a week now we’ve been bombarded with apocalyptic pronouncements from the nerds of mobile land that the new IOS7, incomprehensibly, causes nausea, dizziness and even vomiting.

To which the only logical response must be: if your phone is making you nauseous and dizzy, it probably has less to do with the operating system than with the fact that you insist on picking it up and looking at it every five seconds!

As Barack Obama is fond of saying, nothing here but phony scandals, folks. (Though, to be fair, in his case he means terrorist attacks in Benghazi and state-sponsored spying on personal data, so maybe that’s not exactly the same thing.)

Still, the solution to the Miley and iPhone “scandals” are roughly the same: extricate yourself from your Farmville mentality and your Heat magazine span of attention and just give it a moment’s rational thought.

Is Miley’s self-promotional pluck really impacting on your life? If so, you’ve got bigger problems than just twerking, my friend.

Does a smart phone operating system really have the power to control your mind? OK, don’t answer that. But you get the picture.

Step away from the banal and the twee, citizens, and get on with the business of freaking out over real scandals: Guptagate, a president who doesn’t read, rhinos being slaughtered on an unprecedented scale. If you want to get outraged, take your pick.