Why the Telegraph & Twitter Are Full of Crap

So a hot topic this morning has my blood boiling. Now usually this is just because Mashable posts something ridiculous, most times some Apple loving spew. I'd like to think I keep my temper in check. I usually vent by posting some kind of overtly logical comment, reaping a few "likes" on Disqus and then moving on to something more useful like writing for Teknami. This morning the level of blind ridiculousness hit a new level when several, supposedly, respectable social media personalities were re-tweeting a story from the UK's Telegraph news paper found here that says, only in its title, that more Indians have cell phones than there are toilets.

The first issue is that no where in the article does it quote what the title states. Second there is no link or statement of any kind to back this up. Even the quotation used from the UN individual doesn't include a statement to that effect. The UN individual does state a total sum of money that is needed to meet UN sanitation targets for India but beyond that there is no indication that more phones exist than toilets.

Like wise if we use a little logic and know a little history it's pretty obvious communication has always been more valuable than sanitation. Just pulling a few broad examples. Pheidippides was a greek messenger more interested with delivering the message than stopping to shower up. I have to imagine he also wizzed all over and probably dropped a duce along the way. From the Wikipedia entry:

The legend states that he was sent from the battlefield of Marathon to Athens to announce that the Persians had been defeated in the Battle of Marathon (in which he had just fought),^[3] which took place in August or September, 490 BC.^[4] It is said that he ran the entire distance without stopping and burst into the assembly, exclaiming "Νενικήκαμεν" (Nenikékamen, 'We have won.') before collapsing and dying.

 Like wise sailors through out history have gone with out proper sanitation to deliver reports of war, plague, famine and all sorts of other things back to their hiring parties. Are we all freaked out because soldiers routinely deal with high tech equipment like ROV vehicles, weapons and all sorts of technical toys even though they go weeks at a time in the field with nothing more than wet wipe showers and no toilets. Not so much. The point is the two things are totally unrelated and yet some how this is considered news. Are we seriously so bored with ourselves that we have to literally make crap up?

To top it off the old fashioned news paper style of writing what you want and ignoring the consumer/customer is still holding strong with no method to comment on the sorry excuse for a story. There by shoving this garbage down our throats. When are we as citizens of the internet going to start worrying about the sanitation of the net? Internet garbage like this seems to be piling up!

P.S. In what I thought would be a cute turn of play I borrowed the post image from the telegraph. What was more amusing was finding that that Telegraph apparently has a sort of potty mouth. The image came from an article about Britons tweeting or surfing on the toilet.