Trash Talk

You don’t have spend time in a gas station bathroom to read trash about people you don’t even know….

A new book disclosing campaign secrets and admissions by top politicians is flooding the news. Tiger has been exposed for his indiscretions; Mark McGwire has a mea culpa about his steroid usage. All these little tattle segments flooding our airways, newspapers, TVs, tweets reflect a couple of things:

1. The world is moving along okay. No big disasters or tragedies at present or
2. Our society’s brains have cycled to auto-pilot and the technical nonsensical input and output jargon of ‘garbage-in garbage-out’ has polluted our lives and lifestyles… and
3. Folks are making a tidy sum exposing gossip, missteps, and bad behavior.

It is difficult to create good results when given bad input. The term: garbage-in garbage-out. Defined by Wikipedia as a phrase in the field of computer science or information primarily used to call attention to the fact that computers will unquestioningly process the most nonsensical of input data (Garbage in) and produce nonsensical output (Garbage out). Wikipedia also highlights another term off of the garbage-in garbage-out phrase, “Garbage In, Gospel Out” based on the tendency to put excessive trust in “computerized” data. People have a tendency to believe what they read or see on their computer regardless the source. I don’t know if this is the source for all this plethora of gossip, but we are sure getting an abundant crop recently.

We seem to be producing a great deal of garbage-out MORE garbage-out. When did sharing or spewing gossip become such a past-time? It is sad but true that today our societal missteps are gathered up like precious gold nuggets to be profited on by complete strangers. That’s what happened to all those people we’re hearing and reading about. They did not set out to wind up as tabloid fodder. They didn’t intend for this information to become part of your life or my life. It happened.

There are 1, 610, 000 internet gossip sites. Many are focused on celebrities but there is a rise in sites targeting just about everything. GossipReport.com allows you to share dirt on co-workers. Sick of your neighbor? RottenNeighbor.com lets you publicly out that bad person on your block. You can dish or destroy just about anyone on any topic. College campuses and local schools are rampant with gossips posts and texts consuming the young brains of our country, unfortunately destroying many young egos and in some cases, lives.

Controlling this overwhelming trend begins with us, you and me. It starts with our personal censorship and self-control. It then moves to discussions among our family, especially our children; then our friends and co-workers, to groups we deem influential, like our church. The old adage “sticks and stones can break my bones but names can never hurt us” is not true anymore. The Internet is our new bathroom wall. It’s a nasty commentary of our lives and somebody needs to wash our mouths out with soap.