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Stephen Colbert Sums Up Social Media Perfectly

by Michael Arbeiter

With such fertile grounds for mockery as the U.S. Senatorial election always proves to be, the great and storied Stephen Colbert didn’t limit his targets to the candidates alone. On a special live Election Night episode of The Colbert Report , the host took to lambasting all the ridiculous methods to which colleagues in the political coverage game have stooped in order to “jazz up” the apparently uninteresting concept that is American democracy: one of Colbert’s best comedic segments of the evening concerned the always ripe-for-parody element that is social media.

Colbert pledged to his audience to cover the election via as many social media platforms as he could, lassoing in mention of Uber, Seamless, Zappos, and — one that he was particularly proud of — Adult Friend Finder.

Following the ridiculous array, Colbert utilized the social media wonder Vine to contact a man-on-the-ground rep, hoping to update his loyal Report viewers with a to-the-minute status check on the Senatorial race. Unfortunately, Colbert overestimated the bounties of Vine, finding his rep’s video feed cut off just prior to his announcement of the big winners.

But it was perhaps Colbert’s final note on the topic that landed the hardest, a double-talky valediction that illustrated the endless cycle of social media to a T: you tell the show what you think. The show tells you back what you thought. What the show tells you you thought tells you what to think. And somewhere along the convoluted line, nothing actually happens.

Image: Comedy Central