The Rise of the Idiocracy?: Autism in Top 10 of Google News Searches
December 18, 2006 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
Autism is the Zeitgeist.
Zeitgeist, as in the “spirit of the time”; as in some “general trend of thought or feeling,” some idea, that characterizes the collective cultural consciousness.
And as in, the top 10 most popular searches for Google.news.com.
As Nicholas Carr of Rough Type quips,
The list of our top-ten news searches of the year provides a delightful preview of what we can expect when those dastardly news editors finally stop filtering the news and let “us” decide what we need to know:
Beating autism—1. paris hilton; 2. orlando bloom; 3. cancer; 4. podcasting; 5. hurricane katrina; 6. bankruptcy; 7. martina hingis; coming in behind autism—9. 2006 nfl draft; 10. celebrity big brother 2006.
Carr also notes that Idiocracy, “Mike Judge’s prophetic film about a future America where the leading newsweekly is called Hot Naked Chicks & World Report,” was the movie that attacted most searches for showtimes in 2006. The idio- in “idiocracy” is from the classical Greek idiotes, meaning a “private citizen” and the root word of “idiot” (familiar in autism circles in the notion of the “idiot savant”). The classical Greek word kratos, meaning “power” or “rule,” is the root word of the -cracy in “idiocracy,” which may be literally translated as “rule of the idiot” or, if you are keeping the top 10 searches for Google.news.com in mind, “rule of the idiot savant.”
Who knows but 2007 may be the year of the autistocracy?
I really hope that autism stops being a trend. People are just thinking all the wrong things about it (well that’s my opinion anyway).
I just can’t get over the fact that Paris Hilton and Orlando Bloom top the searches.
But would we want autism to be at the top?
There’s an I Killed the Zeitgeist joke in there, somewhere, I just can’t find it.
And I honestly wouldn’t mind autism being a common search if I agreed more with any of the first hits that come up when you actually search for ‘autism’ on Google. Well, all things considered, I wouldn’t mind, too much.
i just ate my placenta.
Thanks, Mike Judge, for making this superb, hilarious, PROPHETIC movie.
But not all cultures have devalued intelligence and competence as obviously and thoroughly as in the US.
The very concept of ‘education for profit’ is inherently ridiculous (and corrupt), and the US’s so-called “professional class” is being dummied-down along with almost everyone else…especially (but by no means exclusively) in the business/financial sector.
I work in the “education sector” and am trying to keep the emphasis on education and not the notions of “students as consumers”……..daily struggle, but a good one.