Earlier this week the US government had to officially ask people to stop jumping out of moving cars to dance in the streets in response to a viral dance challenge for one of Drake’s songs. About the same time I first read this story, for some reason another story and video about how you can make a spare tire by wrapping duct tape around a bare rim popped up. It’s hard to get away from stories like these and they all seem to have one thing in common: they take stupidity and glorify it to the point of helping it become viral. In some cases, the danger is limited to dumb adolescent behavior. In others it is literally life threatening. The real problem is that stupidity is fun to watch. This truth explains the popularity of probably 80% of all reality television. The question worth asking, I suppose, is whether watching dumb people do idiotic things is actually making us all a little stupider?
Why Does The Internet Make Stupidity So Viral?
