GENERATION SMS

When the fate of the world rests on SMS judges…

Somebody’s going to be crowned Miss Universe this September and somebody’s going to land a major gig with a rock band in a reality TV show. And trust me, it’s not going to be the prettiest or the most talented contestants. Ask me how I know that and I’ll tell you. It’s called the SMS age, my darlings. This is the new technology-driven Dark Age where any dimwit with a cellular phone and a television set can play judge and decide the fates of a lot of smart, pretty or talented people.

Come to think of it, it’s a sad sad situation. Earlier, it was just a bunch of cocky people who sat at the judges’ table and decided who should win. The good thing in this scenario was at least they knew what they were doing, or at least they thought they knew what they were doing. Now, it’s total chaos with people with myopia selecting the ‘face of the year’ and people with 90 per cent hearing impairment choosing our singing idols. All hail the power of SMS votes.

Let’s take a sample of the thought patterns of an average SMS voter: Enki minki ponki… okay, maybe I should vote for Ms. I-quit-my-regular-gig-to-take-part-in-this-competition. If she loses, what will the poor thing do? No, wait! There’s someone here more miserable. He’s lived all his life in a trailer truck. Maybe he needs to win this more than anybody else here!

The deciding factor here is not who is the most worthy contestant that really deserves to win; the parameter is set on who needs to win the gig more than anybody else. So, most often than not, what happens is that a contestant in a rock band audition may get the most number of SMS votes based solely on his/her sex appeal while a contestant in a model search show may get booted from the competition because a majority of the voters decided that they didn’t really like her Puerto Rican accent.

The TV channels, so-called hep magazines and newspapers can go on calling us Generation X or whatever cliché they intend on repeating till kingdom come. The fact remains that this is Generation SMS, raised on unhealthy doses of reality TV shows and SMS opinion polls where we choose our ‘idols’ with the might of our phone balance.

What’s even shallower than that is that we have continuously voted out the best candidates for the job – be it to hold the title of the most beautiful woman in the universe or to be our rock ‘idol’ – and settled for the second best or even the mediocre. Why? Simply because our ‘emotions’ came in the way of better judgement, or because we didn’t know any better. I guess that’s what popular opinion means.

Last I heard, they were letting the viewers select actors to play some characters in a soap opera. What next? Are we going to line up our politicians in a reality show and watch them gang up and connive against the strongest contender and then send our SMS votes for the most camera-friendly to lead our nation? And are we going to vote on whether or not there should be a war in Iraq? God save us from SMS votes. And from ourselves!


At the time of going to print, the author of this column was busy participating in an SMS opinion poll. The question was “Have SMS polls taken over our lives? Type ‘Y’ for Yes or ‘N’ for No.” As expected, she typed ‘N’. At the last count, she had hit the Send button 33 times!

Midweek, 13-19 September, 2006