When the internet was first made available to the general population, it was clear that it was going to change society, perhaps more so than the printing press.
With access to the summation of human knowledge, ignorance would have less room to thrive. Notifications of spam emails would annoy us. Networks of advertisers could influence society by deciding which viewpoints they’d prefer to monetize. Parasocial relationships would develop to the point where lonely people would give thousands of dollars to streamers whom they’ve never met. So on, and so forth.
Among these changes is that bullshitting has been ruined.
If you don’t know what bullshitting is, that’s when a person parrots a story that they’ve heard, often presenting it as their experience, or otherwise making it out to be somehow relevant to them.
Here’s an example that you may have heard:
At my college, a party got so out of hand that a vending machine was picked up and tossed out a window. When a student monitor came and complained, he was thrown out the window, too.
When I hear a story like that, I’m skeptical, but I still humor the guy telling the story. That’s because, like most people, I like stories, especially when the story is interesting.
Hearing that story, you might be thinking, “Wow Raizen, did you go to the same college as me?”, because you probably heard the story, too.
One day, I discovered the website Snopes.com, which compiles and investigates stories like this. The very fact that this story appeared on Snopes goes to show that your college wasn’t special. Or, at least, that it was about as special as every college where this was said to have happened, which is probably all of them.
Or there’s the story about the college library that’s slowly sinking, because the engineers who designed the library didn’t account for the weight of the books. You probably thought that that was your college, if you’ve heard this story before.
Or there’s the story about “a friend of a friend” who one night was instructed by the police to walk towards them without looking back, because otherwise, they’d see what happened to their friend. I heard this story when I was growing up, and later found it on Snopes.
The internet pretty much ruined bullshitting. Worse yet, any illusion you might have had that you knew someone who was connected to an interesting experience probably just stole someone else’s experience, and might not have even had any of their own.
On the internet, there can still be bullshitting, but a person has to be actually creative about it. Each such story that they tell must be original, otherwise, anyone could easily search it and find the original source which was plagiarized.
But have fun trying to bullshit with your original story. Thanks to the art of the green text, a variant of the story you planned on telling has probably already been told. There are so many stories out there now, that it’s become nearly impossible to tell one that’s entirely your own.
I liked the one about the guy who may have discovered a mafia front business, because they seemed confused when he ordered a pizza there, and after waiting 45 minutes, got the best pizza he ever had. If you’ve heard that one, you may have seen it reposted on X.
If bullshitting does live on, at least people are trying to be more creative about it. And with the internet’s anonymous element, that pretty much defeats any narcissistic motive a person may have had in IRL storytelling.
Of course, the nature of some of these stories has also changed to account for the connected nature of current times. Like the story about the guy who edited the Wikipedia article about Planters Peanuts to show the mascot with a monocle on both eyes, and no one noticed for about a year.
Did that actually happen? I don’t know. But it’s obviously not possible prior to an age where anyone can edit an online encyclopedia. It’s also sobering, because there’s the implication that the bar is so low to becoming an urban legend that it could be as easy as editing a Wikipedia page.
Finally, a post about the art of bullshitting would not be complete without mentioning Reddit. Much of Reddit’s popularity can be attributed to just how much people love stories. Even if you don’t go on Reddit, there’s a chance that you’ve come across a post on some other social media site like YouTube which basically comes down to “look what stories I found by using Reddit!”
Unless you can get down to some exquisite cyber-sleuthing, you probably can’t tell whether someone is bullshitting, and there’s a slight inclination to give the benefit of the doubt if the story is believable.
Considering this, perhaps bullshitting hasn’t been completely ruined. But a person has to learn a new set of skills to continue getting away with it. Until the internet, bullshitting was usually stopped in its tracks with the old “nice try, but I heard that one before”. Today, people can link to the original story, so if a person attempts to steal it, their reputation would go down in flames. Search engines make it a whole lot harder to get away with.
When it comes down to it, humans are the same creatures that we have been for ages, enjoying stories as much as we have throughout recorded history. The internet has changed the landscape of storytelling, and bullshitting hasn’t emerged unscathed. But it’s taken on new forms, and we need new skills to identify it.
As much as we love stories, the truth of a matter is still important to us. Otherwise, the reputation of a discovered liar wouldn’t take a hit.
Magnetricity 