Its a Lifestyle Not a choice

THE MEDIA GOT TROLLED INTO THINKING KANYE WEST FANS DON’T KNOW WHO PAUL MCCARTNEY IS

On Thursday, Kanye West and Paul McCartney released a song they collaborated on called “Only One,” in what was inarguably a momentous, generation-spanning moment from two musical icons. So was it any good? If you paid attention to the reactions online you wouldn’t really know, as the conversation almost instantly moved on to a much more important question: Who is Paul McCartney?

One of the laziest forms of contemporary content creation, which I’m sure by now you’re familiar with, is the blog post round up of a series of embedded tweets. It can come in a few different forms: “Look at how outraged people are about XYZ” is the most common variety, but only slightly less so is “Get a load of these dumbass, know-nothing teens.” The purpose is obvious: to leverage our inherent disdain for the ignorance of youth in order to score on a cheap cycle of traffic. And the best part for the dickhead behind it is that it requires almost no effort besides using the search field on Twitter, something only further compounded by the arrival of this news on New Year’s Day, a holiday weekend when most bloggers are phoning it in from the comforts of their hangover couch cocoons.

There’s a reason why Rando on Twitter is considered a generally disreputable source, however, and that’s because while it’s a good first stepping stone for finding information, it’s also an infinite morass of trolling and blatant disinformation. Case in point, this latest tempest in a teapot over young people allegedly not knowing who Kanye West collaborator Paul McCartney is.

Buzzfeed, surprisingly, lead the charge on this one on Friday, headlining a post These Kanye West Fans Want To Know: “Who Is Paul McCartney?” In it, they included screencaps of tweets (not embeds, by the way, which would make following up on them easier) from a series of Twitter users who expressed their confusion over the identity of one of, if not the most famous living musician in the world.