Disliked by 1.19 million people at 13.

On March 29th I Twitted that the infamous Rebecca Black video was pulled down from YouTube after getting 1,276,475 dislikes. For those of you who live under a rock, Rebecca Black is a 13 year old aspiring artist who  posted a video called "Friday” that quickly AND officially became the most despised video on the Internet (even beating Justin Bieber). Her label, Ark Music Factory, posted the video and it immediately became popular for being disliked by so many @http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD2LRROpph0.

Like all sadists, I saw the video and had a laugh with some of the reviews and comments, and OK, I'll be honest, with those painful lyrics:  "yesterday was Thursday, today is Friday...we so excited, tomorrow is Saturday and Sunday comes afterward".

So yeah, I laughed and thought it was not the best thing out there, but after thinking for a while, i thought, who was I to judge this kid when at her age, I didn't even make it into the chorus, much less was I starring in a video. When I was 13, I was so incredibly self conscious of being accepted and liked by everybody; I had a major uni-brow, awful hair, and was a full on tomboy. Rebecca is beautiful and strong, and it's sad to see the amount of hatred she received over this bad "YouTube day". The news even made it to CNN, and Lady Gaga tried to come to the rescue by saying Rebecca was a genius, but  no matter how much a genius she is, the effect of so much negativity at 13 could be devastating.

I thought that all these internet outlets were created to "connect" people, but what happens when the common connection stems from negativity and hatred? how dangerous can this get? We all saw what happened in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya; granted, this collective resentment had a major cause that justified the outcome, but here, we seem to be channeling our emotions in the wrong direction and we forget that whomever we are judging, actually exists in the "real world" - far and away from the binary codes that bring them to our screens.

What would be nice is if so much attention, would be placed on videos where people hit the "Dislike" button on corruption, bailouts or unemployment. So instead of targeting a singing 13 year old kid, we should perhaps try to safely voice our opinions from behind a keyboard to issues that really deserve to be "DISLIKED".

Now I know for sure that I was lucky growing up without the internet. I probably dodged many YouTube, Facebook or Twitter illnesses!