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If Andy Warhol were alive today he would have to retract his overquoted epigram, "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." Well, since he ain't and I am, I'll tell you why.I've been mystified by the encroachment of Facebook into the lives of pretty much everyone under 30 and a shocking number of people over that age. I'll allow for the possibility that social media could possibly serve some minor constructive purpose in postmodern society even if I can't tell you what that would be. My best take on it has been that Facebook exists for people who want to star in their own reality show; people who understand that the only rule for becoming famous is to become well known. Social networking technology provides such people with a powerful, cannibalistic multimedia "platform" that they can use to dedicate their lives to collecting "friends" and "fans." For the mass of them, I will say, stereotypingly, the quest for said friends and fans involves relentless online disclosure of every thought fragment that causes three synapses to fire. And between those events, there's a world of fun to be had trolling banal data streams issuing from every other fellow contestant. When everybody "follows" everybody else on the World Wide Web, then everyone is world-famous for the duration. This amounts to a shocking rebuke to Warhol's vision, which in any case was more akin to a knowing wisecrack than a profundity.
But today I learned that the world is even better for fame-seekers --- right now --- than my dystopian best guess for the future. Big Hussein Otis sent me this New York Times technical bulletin on the latest colorful timewasting trend to emerge from social networking: a cornucopia of new business models based on specialized social networking web sites for sharing "TMI," as the post-Friends generation likes to say:
A wave of Web start-ups aims to help people indulge their urge to divulge — from sites like Blippy, which Mr. Brooks used to broadcast news of what he bought, to Foursquare, a mobile social network that allows people to announce their precise location to the world, to Skimble, an iPhone application that people use to reveal, say, how many push-ups they are doing and how long they spend in yoga class.The reporter continues to reveal that "Blippy" members share access to their Gmail accounts with the company so it can publish their purchases, thereby greatly increasing the "Blippy" members' street cred by about a zillion I suppose.
In the pithy blurb he sent with the link, Big Otis observed: "those silly millennials --- making the world safe for fascism." I disagree. If this is where American society is headed there will be no need for fascism. After all, the Morlocks did not need to resort to fascism in order to feast on the Eloi --- all they needed was a scary-sounding air raid siren and a docile population with one highly motivating conditioned response. The siren in our real-world postmodern case of course, like the Sirens of Ulysses, is every bit as sinister as what the Morlocks used. But unlike The Odyssey and very much like the Eloi, few today are tied to the mast or have intentionally plugged their ears. So Silicon Valley scumbags glibly brag about their super new business models to The New York Times. Here's how it works: a generation surrenders its privacy to corporations in order to build a "fan base"; American society is rewarded with a terminal load of gangrene.
Update before I'm through: I don't fully or exclusively blame the "millennials" for their victimhood. Besides the prime mover in this sickening trend --- the information-industrial complex --- plenty of blame belongs to Baby Boomers and their clueless concepts of what it means to be a good parent and a good citizen. (Hoy, I need to get me to the prayer meeting.)
I recently had a discussion about how many people are just plain "bragging" on FB and how it bothers us. And how boring it is.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, I was "THIS CLOSE" to being on Countdown tonight. I actually tweeted KO and asked him how many chickens he needed for his recent colonoscopy. He RT'd me. Thought I might be on his show as his Tweet of the Day, but since I tweeted yesterday and he wasn't on, I guess I didn't make it.
So here ya' go, an imperfect example of your point. I use FB to talk to friends and friends only. Twitter is like Short Wave Radio. Everybody listening hears it, and maybe someone likes it. And maybe they can find you again.
And then there are anonymous blogs and anonymous commenters.
Word Verification: uncol
either Uncol Gordie
OR
that comment was totally uncol
Gurlitzer: it's not the technology itself that bothers me, unlike television. It's how this technology has become so pervasive in such a short time. According to Big Rock Head, the founder of Facebook thinks it's really cool and vital that you can now have conversations with dozens of people... without even being in the same room as them! As if humans have a need to communicate with dozens of superficial acquaintances concurrently and as if there's something "uncol" about breathing the same air as the person you're talking with. Like I said, I'll stipulate that these technologies may have some kind of redeeming social function even if I don't know what it is. It's kind of cool that some of these media give us the ability to easily contact prominent people we historically haven't had any way to interact with, but how much time can we really spend on that when there is asparagus to be planted upside down and cacti to be spoken with? Meanwhile, corporate slime know too well how to mercilessly exploit it in the culture of runaway narcissism that they have created over the past 60 years for the purpose of selling things... because that's why they invented it. And it's self-reinforcing. Simulation modelers would call it a feedback loop.
ReplyDeleteSo what exactly should be defined as terrorism? A pissed off extremist who detonates an effective, world-wide EMP, preferably of the non-nuclear kind, and amputates the gangrene---- OR, clever little MBAs and techies who continue to come up with these noxious business models that hasten the formation of our future race of Eloi?
ReplyDeleteIt's hard to predict; especially the future. More change/more the same etc. Nothing wrong per se with a wider conversation, though there are dangers of group think, mind numbing time wasting drivel, and especially the demise of critical analysis as helped with historical perspective(s) of the evil that men do. The proportions of 2 ears and 1 mouth comes to mind. And the ubiquitous sifting maw of data mining is more nefarious than any iron fist. One thought might be C.-Amendments for:
ReplyDelete1. individual digital data rights (w. real teeth for abridgement such as required x10 punative awards), and,
2. removing for good "personhood" from corporations and similar entities they might morph into
(ongoing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood_debate -and-
http://movetoamend.org/)...sort of a new Roe v. Wade in a non-orthogonal direction.
Florestan
PS In the mirror I see people typing on computers...what would a Dorian Gray of the Digital Age look like, both now and later? Pogo, for one, has met the enemy.
I can not help be remain somewhat cautious yet cynical of all this futuristic technology, knowing that somewhere there is a digital imprint of everything ever said, typed, and done, and that eerie feeling of realizing how much George Orwell was so far ahead of his time, corporate slime aside.
ReplyDeleteI'm encouraged by the possibilities and functionality, but I still lock the doors at night.
Oil Can: don't think we have an non-nuclear EMP devices, but a detonation in low-earth orbit could fuck up lots of stuff without skyscrapers necessarily falling over. I'll once again recommend "Diversion" by Bruce Sterling. Like PKD, Sterling isn't a high-art writer, but is a first-rate speculative thinker. He has a lot to say about the fate of information monopoly culture.
ReplyDeleteFlorestan: nothing against communications tech; just against how corporations are extracting value from it at the expense of a generation that has largely had shit for guidance from their complacent Baby Boomer parents. Completely agree with points 1 and 2. I'm less concerned about what anyone can actually do with data mining than what they will claim to be able to do with it. The data are so noisy, fragmentary, chaotic, and un-curatable that I believe it will be effectively useless. However, any few given data points could be extracted out of context to accuse anybody of pretty much anything.
59er: see above. But also, social media includes blogs. But here I try to interact 1:1 with people interested enough to comment. It's an egocentric activity, yes, but carried out with a certain amount of intent and discipline in order to avoid intruding too much or completely embarrassing myself. Now if you will excuse me I must finish my Brazilian auto-wax....