- Gale is a TV producer from Los Angeles. He is also the proud winner of "Most tragic display of attention-seeking neediness of the week", beating even Kate Moss posing in Playboy with a pom-pom pinned to her rear end – so you're already getting an idea of the depths of idiocy here. Last Thursday, while many Americans were trying to escape their families and digest their Thanksgiving turkey, Gale entertained them by live-tweeting an encounter on an aeroplane with a woman called "Diane". He described how he avenged Diane's rudeness to the air stewards by telling her to "eat my dick", and the internet cheered. Thinkpieces sprouted up instantly, some asking why the web was so casually misogynistic, others asking whether so many would have been supportive of Gale's vigilantism if he'd been anything other than a Caucasian man. Most simply claimed Gale had "won Thanksgiving" (sorry, pilgrims). And then it transpired on Monday night, after several days of self-defensive self-righteousness from Gale, that he had made the whole thing up. Incidentally, Gale is 30. Not 13. Thirty.
NPR wrote a nice little piece about this today too regarding skepticism about stories on the internet. I rather liked the paragraph she ended the article with:To paraphrase an old bit of wisdom for our time: If you love a story, set it adrift on an ocean of suspicion that it is horsepucky. If it bobs to the surface and comes back to you and is seaworthy, it is yours to keep as part of the enjoyable flotsam and jetsam of the internet. But if it sinks like a dumbbell and the scavenging critters on the ocean floor immediately chew it to death, it was probably a dude amusing himself at the airport to begin with.
That's a lot more poetic than my, "Every story on the internet is fake until thoroughly proved otherwise."
EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS A LIE Really, though, I read about the Elan Gale thing, it was funny, but I didn't think it was worth the attention it was getting. Now, I think the same thing, except more. (Or less. I don't think it deserves all this outcry about how it's fake, because you know what? That's still us talking about it. )
It went pretty viral. I was laughing at it but I didn't really care if it was true or not. It was a short story told in twitter screenshots and provided an entertaining 2 minutes. I'm still not sure why we continue to overanalyze these sorts of things. People will always lie, make up stories, do things to make themselves look better, etc. It happened before the internet and will continue to happen online and offline today
so was this! irrelevant but potentially more entertainingIt was a short story told in twitter screenshots
I think it's over-analyzed due to over-exposure. Now that I think of it, is "over-exposure" even a thing anymore? When something is spread so quickly and thoroughly it is often not subjected to critical analysis prior to being welcomed as truth by large groups of people. While this particular instance seems relatively harmless, it's sad to to think of how widely accepted other bits of untruth can become, for purposes of exemplification: the vaccination debacle. I think debunking even the most innocuous bits of misinformation can help stem the tide of these sorts of things.