Samsung continues to encourage us to Share the Fun Pain this Holiday Season

I'll give the makers of the latest horror from Samsung this much:  At least they didn't go the usual route of sprinkling a few Black/Hispanic/Asian faces among the partiers here.  Nope- this is a white family, enjoying what I guess is supposed to be a cute moment with their white friends and their white kids.  Not especially PC, and certainly not common these days- but I have to give them points for creating an ad that is more realistic than 99 percent of the commercials out there.

But that's about it with the praise.  Because the rest of the ad just adopts and endorses the Friends Is Just Another Word For Assholes theme we generally see in commercials for Cell Phones, Tablets, and all the other "Connectivity" garbage.  I don't know- maybe it's just me, but if I saw a guy trying to entertain my kids fall off the stairs, land on the hardwood floor, and lay there motionless, my first impulse wouldn't be to keep filming.  Because my first thought wouldn't be "OMIGOD LOL THIS IS GOING VIRAL UNDER THE TITLE 'SANTA FAIL!""  My first thought would be "Oh My G-d, are you hurt?"

But that's because I live in some weird alternate universe where people still give a damn, I guess.  Where "walk if off, Santa" wouldn't even occur to me.  And where capturing someone getting hurt on film is still accidental and regrettable, not an LOL EPIC bonus that will really improve my rating on YouTube.

I can remember a show called "America's Funniest Home Videos."  Pretty much every clip I ever (accidentally) saw on that show featured someone getting hurt (often badly) to the sound of people roaring with laughter.  That show had a pretty solid audience, but it was small, so I wasn't all that disturbed by the concept of a program which invited people to film each other suffering and then "share" it with the world.  But in the year 2012, capturing everything on--err, "film"--just seems to come naturally for a lot of people, and when a "friend" gets injured, that's just gravy.  It doesn't even matter if the friend was dressed up like Santa to spread a little joy to your kids.  It's just so great that he hurt himself, you can't wait to let the world know how funny it was.  Sick.