Simple Criminal Minds

My favorite mother-in-law hooked my bride on the television series Criminal Minds during her last visit. I started watching the show as well, and sort of followed along. I was ok with the show until a recent episode in which Fonzie used his motorcycle to jump a shark in a pool in front of Al’s. Ok, wrong show. Sort of.

For those unfamiliar with the show, Criminal Minds is about the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. Profilers, in other words. They’re called to various places around the country to profile serial killers and thereby help local law enforcement catch the bad guy. I think the show has good actors, it’s just a shame they don’t have better scripts from which to act.

Case in point, the afore-referenced shark-jumping episode – death by social media. That wasn’t the title of the episode, it was actually called “The Internet is Forever”. To me, this episode was written in the Scooby Doo genre. Allow me to explain: In this episode, the team (consisting of three Fred’s, two Daphne’s, one Velma, and [definitely] one Shaggy – though missing a dog) hopped aboard the Mystery Gulfstream 200 and flew to Boise Idaho to track down a psycho killer who was using information gleaned from the InterWebs – social media sites, specifically – to pick his victims. Now it turns out the victims all shared facial features and… well, I won’t ruin it for those who TiVo. Let’s just say the topic/motive of narcissism came up. And then it was related to social media.

I know. Hard to believe isn’t it?

I’m getting a little tired of the media’s latest end-run around social media and the InterWebs. I’m not narcissistic. I’m a wonderful person and everyone is interested in the minutia of my daily life. The quicker the media figures that out, the sooner we can all settle down for some Scooby Snacks.

Social media is, in many respects, the new backyard fence and corner garage. Granted, the fence circles the planet a few times and the garage is the size of Texas. People communicate. We’ve been communicating for as long as there have been people. The internet doesn’t change that. It does change the number of people and the velocity with which we communicate. The InterWebs weren’t beamed here from some distant planet – every page has been built by humans, directly or indirectly.

Where does the “professional media” – who previously (exclusively) wrote and were published – get the impression that everyone who writes and publishes is narcissistic? Hmmm? Maybe they could get away with it if it weren’t for us meddling kids. Just sayin’…

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Andy Leonard

andyleonard.blog

Christian, husband, dad, grandpa, Data Philosopher, Data Engineer, Azure Data Factory, SSIS guy, and farmer. I was cloud before cloud was cool. :{>

2 thoughts on “Simple Criminal Minds

  1. It’s simple. The professional media loves themselves enough to call the social-media being filled with narcissist. It’s like the pot calling the kettle black.

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