This Friday brings us yet another season of ‘The Amazing Race’. Which means yes, more TAR recaps incoming! I would like to make a tiny request, though, as we prepare for the season. Consider this a polite attempt to pre-empt a certain type of comment.
Can we not call these people any variant of “fame-addicted Internet whores” simply because these people are all on social media? I mean, I freely admit to being a woefully out-of-touch person when it comes to these things. I don’t know what to put on a Tumblr or how to put it on there if I did, I tweet infrequently at best, I couldn’t tell you what an Instagram was at gunpoint, and I managed to miss MySpace completely and skip directly to Facebook (which I primarily read because it’s the only way to know what the hell is going on with my extended family).
(Actually, I’m going to pause there with a brief anecdote that explains why I use Facebook to keep up with my family news. I was visiting my parents, and they said, “So guess who we saw yesterday? Your grandma and grandpa!” I was like, “Wait, wait. Grandma and Grandpa came up here to visit all the way from Oklahoma and you didn’t tell me?” “Oh, well, you can come with us to see them tomorrow. They’re up here to visit your cousin Laura’s new baby.” “I didn’t even know Laura was married!” “Oh, yes. She’s married and she just had her first kid.” At this point, I was beginning to wonder what else I didn’t know, so I asked about Laura’s brother. “What about Brian? Is he married too?” “No, he and Brandy broke up. He moved to Thailand to coach MMA fighters.” “Oh, now you’re just making things up!”)
(They were not, in fact, making things up.)
The point is, I acknowledge freely that I neither know nor have a particular desire to care about the YouTubers and the Instagrammers and the Tumblrs and the Grindrs and…wait. I don’t think there are any “Grindr celebrities” on this season of the Race. But even if there were, I don’t understand why people are getting so mad that other people a) use a relatively new form of communication to discuss things of importance to them, and b) are apparently good enough at it that large numbers of other people are paying attention to them. It does not make them bad people, it does not make them deserving of scorn and hatred, and let’s all try to take them for who they are as the new season commences.
Only then will we start developing irrational hatred of them.
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The problem is, are they the YouTube celebrities who discuss news/put together how-to videos that are genuinely interesting/entertaining? Or are they the ones who put together short skits whose humor is too lowbrow for fart jokes? If the former, ok I’ll give it a shot (assuming directv will actually record the series with no problems). If the latter, nope.
Seriously, John, you need to call your parents more often.
That was the worst part! I talk to them on a weekly basis and they never brought up any of this shit! Facebook cuts out the middleman. My cousins can tell me about their life without filtering it through someone who’s apparently able to forget that Brian moved to Thailand, covered his body with tribal tats, and now teaches people how to apply submission holds.
(Still just the sweetest guy, mind you.)
I for one look forward to the TAR recaps! Since I never actually watch the show.
I should be on FB for the exact reason you give – most of my relatives are on it. But I just can’t like it (no pun intended) – its entire layout feels user-unfriendly to me. I’ll be curmudgeonly, I suppose.
Laridian . .. you should give TAR a view. I read recaps from the first season on Mighty Big TV, but I had to watch the episodes on tape and DVD to filly appreciate them.
I’m more or less of a caveman . . . no phones hooked up with WiFi, no Facebook or Twitter, and I only started my blog after I got dismissed from a recapping site.
You know, the John Seavey Family Recap sounds more interesting than the Race recaps.
I’m sure the racers will give us plenty of reason to despise them without any reference to what they get up to online.
As someone who only started watching the show last season (entirely due to these entertaining recaps) I can only hope that there will be heroes and villains aplenty.
@Dylan: We’re either really boring or really fun, depending on your POV. And I can vouch for the fact that his parents really are like that, and he has dinner with them once a week.
The weirdness is multigenerational. From John’s FB feed:
Devi mentioned at lunch today that she was reading a book that speculated Jack the Ripper was a woman. Kidlet raised a tentative fist and said, “Um…girl power?”
Signed, John’s Wife. 😀
With John’s help, I wrote about why I like TAR. Read it and tune in Friday night!