Blue wrote:This brave new century has people jumping through hoops while they imagine they're a Celebrity. Everyone dove into the FB pool head first. That was in addition to their LinkedIn, Google, etc. etc. accounts. Then they joined Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, ad infinitum, riding on that addiction high.
The drones will eventually have a string of icons taking up more space on their website than the actual substance. Who can possibly participate, update and respond to so many platforms and still do whatever it is that you do in the first place?
This brings a bunch of the points in my half-formed critique of social media closer to the surface. Sometimes I wonder if I'm having a difficult time putting it all into words because there's just so much wrong, I'm not sure where to begin:)
Everyone has a bit of exhibitionist in them, that's natural. But social media seems to inflate that side of the personality. The high is pleasurable. People conform themselves to patterns to feed their addiction, some more consciously than others. A mangled version of Andy's famous phrase comes to mind. On the Internet, everyone is famous for fifteen nanoseconds, every day.
Everyone also has a bit of voyeur in them. Social media inflates that, as well. It starts to look like consumers who have resigned themselves to living in a virtual panopticon, watching each other making shadow-puppets on the walls.
And who has the time? Whoever can afford it. And even then, there just aren't enough hours in a day. But this reinforces divisions of class and money. The internet is not the great, equalizing democracy/anarchist utopia it is marketed as.
Then there's this other thing about time. Few thoughts and ideas are perfect in their raw, unpolished form. Most need refinement. The time it takes to build on a good idea depends on the skill of the refiner. But many good ideas just need time to ferment, and those are usually the best kind. I wonder if the fracturing and shortening of attention spans is hurting the overall quality of thought. The way things are set up, we'd hardly even notice it. Especially from within the medium.
And the most important point, I think, is that updating social media takes away time from doing 'whatever it is that you do in the first place.' There's less time for people to become well-rounded individuals. And there's already never enough hours in the day for that, anyway.
So there's some more half-formed critique.
It's only a metaphor, about metaphorical fish.
As I was going down the 'McLuhan route,' that metaphor came to mind. I've seen him use it in this context. As metaphors go, I think it's a fairly clear one, though. Agree or disagree, we both knew what was meant by it. I certainly didn't mean to insult the fish. Salt the fish, now that's another matter.
And I don't mean to be fresh. I'll leave that to the fish.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
