Very stupid Facebook quizzes

If I sent you this graphic in an email to promote my business, you’d possibly think I was either mad, or of extremely low intelligence.

What’s more, with some of the acknowledged great cities of the world not having the letter “A” in their name – London, New York, Tokyo, Sydney, Hong Kong, Beijing, Delhi, Mexico City, Toronto, Moscow, Edinburgh, Berlin, Rome, Boston  - I could go on – you really would question the use of this at all, apart from irritation that I sent it to your in-box in the first place.

At the time I wrote this, it had been doing the rounds on facebook courtesy of Power 95.3 Radio, with the statement “This one is hard” (I'd hate to see something they class as easy) added by the social network manager at the station.

It had received no fewer than 260,000 ‘comments’ and, believe it or not, 30,000 ‘likes’ – that’s over a quarter of a million people reached, many presumably of average or better intelligence, who thought it worthy of sharing this nonsense with others. Others who had presumably never heard of London, New York, Tokyo, Toronto, Mexico City, Hong Kong, Moscow, Sydney, Rome or Berlin.

With all those shares and  likes, comes the accolade of a message achieving viral status.  This does not take into account the number of people who will have seen it and not passed comment because they didn't want to be seen by their peers as having the IQ of a house brick.

It is an altogether remarkable achievement. That something so intrinsically stupid, worthless and a total insult to average intelligence, together with a totally puerile opinion on its difficulty, could be seen and be passed on by so many people.

Yes, OK, it has worked for them. It's given Power 95.3 some free, but not especially great, publicity, although in my eyes, if this is seen as a very hard challenge, I dread to think what the conversation of the presenters on the radio station might be like. Probably monosyllabic apart from the odd "hello inmates" now and again.

However, this doesn’t mean that you should immediately sit down either alone, or with your ‘creative team’ (your dog and a bowl of fruit) and spend several hours trying to think up something totally stupid that you think will be passed along and guarantee you immense free publicity!