We love the Internet. Except when we hate it. Every week, Jordan Valinsky bottles the angst of his Millennial generation and finds something to despise about the Web.
Poking, liking, and fingertagging are now regular activities in our lives, so of course the next step to capitalize on those remedial actions is to create a college major revolving around them.
At Newberry College, which sounds like one of those generic preparatory schools on Law and Order: SVU, they’re offering a major and minor in social media. At first glance, it sounds appropriate, since it takes a college major to figure out Facebook’s privacy options (am I right, moms of the world?) but apparently that’s not the point.
Beginning next year, the South Carolina college will let students major in an activity they already know how to do (similar to completing a major in English). The press release states that the aim is to “develop marketing and branding strategies for projects including corporate, non-profit, entertainment, sports, news, and politics.”
So, for $120,000 you’re learning how to “manage” the Home Depot’s Twitter account and spread terrible falsehoods that “connecting” with fans is something important in people’s lives. On the bright side, spending all day on the Internet gives Newberry students a distraction from realizing they went to college in South Carolina.
Newberry states that graduates of this glorified “How to Create a Page on Facebook” major will land students jobs in various fields, like news and politics. So when a congressman posts a shirtless picture on Craigslist or Nancy Grace needs her Pinterest quote board updated, that all falls on you. Or worse, you could write for us.
How excited to tell your high school friends on that Wednesday before Thanksgiving that you’re the one dealing with pissed off Southwest passengers on Twitter? I’m pumped for you!
To further instill how pointless this major is, the Huffington Post notes that you’ll also learn how to create QR codes as part of “mobile marketing strategies.” I can teach you in a minute: Just move your “cursor” over to this hyperlink, click (only once), and look at all those people using those blocky, drunk looking QR codes. I’d suggest you skip that day’s class, but a student on College Prowler notes that Newberry has “absolutely nothing for students to go to,” so class is your only option for entertainment.
So, yeah, this whole major is just the worst, unless Newberry’s real purpose to major in some high-class trolling (which judging by the tuition and telling people they too can work for Fortune 500 companies… they might be?). Don’t waste your money. I’ll teach you what to know.
For a $50 gift card to Chili’s and a voucher for one year of LinkedIn Premium, I’ll teach you the ins-and-outs of social media-ing. How to improve that Klout score by tweeting at Lindsay Lohan so other people favorite it? Done. Passively-aggressively faving tweets of people you want to follow you back? I’ll show you. Trolling the hell out of Facebook by liking and unliking your friends’ photos during their fat stages so they pops up on the top of your mutual friends’ News Feeds? Let’s start now.
We could meet in Google+, but I’m still trying to figure out what that is.
Photo via lindsaymccutchen/YouTube
