Most of you would still remember the big twerking fail video on Youtube where a girl was
filming herself twerking before falling back first onto a glass table filled with candles and her leg
lit up on fire. Yes, that was hilarious. But, did you also know that the video was actually fake?

If this comes as a surprise to you, it should be. Recently, Jimmy Kimmel revealed on his show
that the whole video was shot two months ago before the whole Miley Cyrus “sensation” came
to rise and he only released it a week after “twerking” became a household thing. The video
became such an underdog hit that practically every cable news network had to cover the story,
and thus giving this video the attention we were all duped into believing in.

This is an excellent example to show how naïve and overly-trusting we have become ever since
we relied on technology for all our information. Society has transformed into a huge sponge
that’s willing to absorb anything the media tries to sell us. We’ve tend to question less and
learned to accept what everybody believes in.

This isn’t even a new phenomenon. Way back then, the media constantly instilled fear into
suburban homes by generating a terror factor that everyone in the world were trying to either kill
us, bomb us, strike us or etc. It was a way to keep people “in line” and for them to follow every
order they were given.

I could probably come up with a list of media hoaxes just in the last few years alone to the tune
of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire”, because there were so many of them you would have
no idea what to put your trust in. There was the constant Facebook shutting down and privacy
rumors, the impending deaths and death threats upon celebrities, the never-ending “we’regoing-to-die-today” spectacle, supposedly pictures of every country in the world, that includes
you North Korea, carrying WMD’s and testing them out and to top it all of, Manti Te’o getting
catfished.

Yes, it was indeed an interesting and exciting last few years but it does point out that people have
become extremely reliant on the mass and social media to dictate their information in the 21
century. It is very important that you never take anything given to you for granted regardless of
how miniscule or trivial they may be. As a smart and ever-improving citizen of the world, you
have the right and freedom to question everything and accept nothing. Do not be persuaded or
influenced easily, if not by the media then even by friends, because information comes in all
different shapes and sizes and it is only wise to look at them from every angle possible before
coming to a conclusion. If you are able to do this correctly, I’m fairly confident that somewhere
out there René Descartes would be very proud of you.

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