Brad Paisley and the Alter Ego July 3, 2008

Assignment:

Find the video for Brad Paisley’s So Much Cooler Online.What can you say about the characters in the music video? How does their personality change online/offline? What conclusions can you draw?

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I had never heard this song or watched the music video before, and I thought that it was hilarious.  Brad Paisley’s So Much Cooler Online, completely captures the essence of creating an alter ego over the internet.  The character of the fairly plump and dorky pizza-man who creates an image of a country-rock star with a great voice, a hunky body, and more money than he can count was very interesting.  I laughed aloud when we see the pizza-man online chatting with two gorgeous, young ”model” type women, who in their own right, turn out to be older women with a frumpy, homely look.   By the end of the song even the pizza-man’s parents, whom he lives with, desire an alter ego.  While the dad is creating a profile for himself on a Myspace or Facebook type program, his wife comments about how all of his friends are rather “chesty.” She says to get revenge she will create a profile just so she can have a friend that looks like Brad Paisley. 

Postman states in his book Technopoly  that, “Karl Marx understood technology well in saying that technologies create the ways in which people perceive reality, and that such ways are the key to understanding diverse forms of social and mental life,” (21).  This has a direct connection to the Brad Paisley song.  Our own thoughts about what is “attractive” or “acceptable” in American/Western society has driven people to create alternate realities, lying about who and what they really are.  This is not always good and can lead to disastrous results.

For instance, I think about the young girl who committed suicide a few years ago because of her relationship with a young “boy” over Myspace.  The young “boy” told her that the world would be better off without her.  The young “boy” was in fact a classmate and the classmate’s mother who lied about the profile so that they could gain this other girl’s trust to see if she was talking bad about people in her school.  This says a lot to me about perceived reality and the mental state of each person involved.  I am certainly not a psychologist but it was messed up situation on all sides and technology was at the center of it.  I also know that technology has been used by criminals to lure people young and old into schemes and horrible situations. 

To go along with this idea, one piece of technology that has recently come out on Myspace and is becoming quite the trend, is for young people to add what is called a Truth Box to their website.  This is a box that allows people to anonymously leave “truthful” comments about the person.  This is really sad to me because I can just imagine some of the things that are said and it seems to avert working out conflict face to face while at the same time allowing people to haphazardly leave mean or malicious comments without fully thinking about the repercussions of their words. 

I am just saddened by the fact that people actually think they are finding life in their lies.  Just like in the music video.  Like the pizza-man, a lot of people can’t be or choose not to be who they really are because they aren’t confident enough in themselves or our world tells them over and over again through television, magazines, movies, etc. that they AREN’T good enough. 

I think we convince ourselves that having an alter ego is fun…that we can be anyone and have anything.  However, I believe that a part from the cute music video, it is more harmful than we allow ourselves to believe.  While it is human beings that are using the technology for these purposes if they knew that the technology was more regulated they might think twice about making up things up about themselves for their own selfish purposes.