Caveat emptor

‘Caveat emptor’ is a legal term which means, “… the buyer alone is responsible for checking the quality and suitability of goods before a purchase is made.”

In this information age where random words welded together into sentences are broadcast around the world more often than farts are broadcast through a room, the validity of the words need to be deeply scrutinized before believing. I have known this since the beginning of the internet, but before now never been able to put a name to it. I first heard this phrase on a news show where a woman TV journalist lashed at a woman victim of sexual abuse, who thought the TV journalist had a funny hairstyle. The said victim was accusing Aziz Ansari for acting weirdly and inappropriately on their first date. The incident brought about a lot of negative press for the accuser, and her credibility was being questioned, because said accuser was not doing justice to the #MeToo campaign by being mean to another woman and potential victim to inappropriate sexual advances from men.

Twitter, where this all started, is considered by middle-aged commentators to be ‘like every half-wit being handed a megaphone’. While this is sort of true because a lot of the random words welded together on twitter is deplorable, it is also true that twitter because it provides a megaphone to every half-wit, sometimes if the half-wit can get another half and complete themselves, start a movement like #MeToo. This does not under any circumstance reduce the need to practice caveat emptor while reading any of the stuff posted on the internet, especially on twitter. By careful and patient research through caveat emptor however, the truth comes out eventually. This needs to change before the #MeToo campaign gets derailed because too many people don't want to go through the trauma of sifting through the internet haystack to find the metaphorical needle.

The need to practice caveat emptor on potential ‘fake news’ propagated by the 'gibberal' media (those who write gibberish on the internet; pun on the attack on 'liberal' media for propagating fake news. Get it?) is a complicated and controversial issue which needs discussion in open forums. This puts a lot of pressure on regular people trying to make sense of the trash piles of information on the internet. Something that was not so much of an issue in the early days of the web.

Back then, I used to write blogs on a blogging tool called ‘rediffiland’, and Facebook was still not invented. It was an innocent world. There was a small community of bloggers from around the world. They all had the time to read through a page of words and sometime even reflect on the contents by way of comments. Then Facebook arrived, and for a brief period it was the perfect world. The long form reached a larger audience. Then started the trend of nano-articles, then tweets, which totally killed blogs unless you were a make-up artist or compulsively hysterical whiner. After that no one had the time to read long blogs or articles. The only way you could capture anybody’s attention was by writing flashy or dramatic words, what is often referred to as ‘click-bait’.

However how many flashy or dramatic attention grabbing headlines can there be in this world? This is when, in order to grab peoples’ attention, writers and bloggers started to make up sh*t. Then all hell broke loose. An avalanche of sh*t started falling with such ferocity that it still tumbles down in torrents to this day. Does it not in these extraordinary circumstances, be only appropriate to exercise some caution or ‘caveat emptor’ while reading anything on the internet? Tread with caution, and be the judge. *sigh*