Targeted infoconsumers are overwhelmed by infojunk -- no wonder the junk-food place in our USA neighborhoods is called 7/11, non-stop eating of "food," is so similar to non-stop "news cycles."
"Data," which I used above, is the wrong word.
What is needed, above all, is not data but the sought-for and, of course, impossible acquisition of wisdom, an aspiration in theory fulfilled by careful study (not to speak of experience), through time and a knowledge of the past -- the past not being, of course, a "canon," but an awareness that "today" was not always the case in a society where "now" is all that counts, as encouraged by (God bless 'em) the new social media.
I don't want to sound as pontificating as Polonius in Hamlet, but only through the past can we understand the present or imagine the future.
What is wisdom, which in my convoluted prose I have tried to describe above? Lord Chesterfield has a good take on it: "In seeking wisdom thou art wise; in imagining that thou hast attained it - thou art a fool."
I frankly can't stand Facebook, a two-way mirror where the "information" we "friends" supposedly provide one another is just a camouflaged way for data-collection by profit-obsessed corporations to "target" us for whatever info/food/consumer junk they want us to "buy."
Facebook's latest upgrade, Timeline, which archives everything you write on Facebook, is an privacy-invasion atrocity. Big Brother?
But I do use Facebook, reluctantly, to "keep up" with the times, although evidently teenagers have had enough of it, according to a recent report by the LA Times.
Facebook is an anachronism. I give it another two-three years. Anyone (of a certain age?) who saw the film "The Social Network," with its dreadful misogynist "hero," boy-genius Zuckerberg, cannot help but come to this conclusion (don't tell me Zuck and his lawyers didn't ok the film).
Basically Zuckerberg, as portrayed in the flick, is a guy who can't stand people, especially women, face-to-face. So he creates Facebook so as to click them off his me/men-centered life.
Persons younger than I, I should note, don't agree with yours truly about this. Zuck is a hero among them. So be it.
But maybe, despite the lingering buzz about Zuck being cool, Wall Street investors are not so dumb after all -- consider their reaction to Zuck's idiotically-planned IPO.
I bet you Facebook will be replaced by another silly, me-centered social "medium," and maybe -- yes, maybe -- people, fed up with the social-media nonsense, eventually will talk and see one another again, in the light of day rather than on a computer screen.
Then, maybe, elevated in the social consciousness, will be a pleasant meal and conversation in the "real" world -- when we get down to it, the real world is all we've got on this side of the grave (think of seeing your real friends face-to-face and growing your own vegetables).
And I'm not talking about a "brown-bag" lunch in some dumpy office at "work," but a junk-free-food meal with a nice glass of red wine (if appropriate) -- which, as a human rather than "professional" experience, we will actually remember.
Nor am I talking about a cell-phone to cell-phone "conversation," with its "yeahs," "like," "whatever," screeches-on-a-blackboard by teens passing for human communication that are forgotten as soon as they are uttered.
But, of course, a nostalgic face-to-face oh-so-passe illusion about remembrance in our modern world too is subject to much, much doubt as to its survival -- we are evolving beyond what used to be called our "human" selves, with no distinction between the virtual and the real, between cyberspace experience and human rememberance.
No philosopher, but interested in philosophy (what I understand of it), I believe that Plato had it right when he condemned writing as a substitute for memory.
If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.I stress this quotation not because I am against literature (my father was a published poet, the kind of people Plato would have expelled from the Republic), but because I find that Plato's words are relevant -- and a warning -- about our illusory, memory-less social-media world.
Or should I say memory-controlled world? (Which amounts to the same thing as memoryless). In industrialized countries people increasingly don't remember anything anymore (too much of a bother), but the powers-that-be controlling the Internet sure do.
And, I bet you, they -- the powers-that-be, and granted I cannot identify them specifically -- will use what you don't care to remember about you against you -- or, in the spirit of Brave New World, to "make you happy" through targeted "buy this" campaigns.
I paraphrase from failing memory what Gore Vidal said: "Don't call it the United States of America -- call it the United States of Amnesia."
Of course, through the social media, you and our "friend" can arrange to break bread in the real world. But please ask her/him to turn off her/his cell phone as you attempt to make face-to-face conversation.
P.S. I much worry, as a former US public-diplomacy diplomat involved in the so-called ideological struggle of the Cold War, how much today the imaginative Moscow intelligentsia (currently so outspoken on Facebook) realizes that its words/images are being recorded/archived by persons not particularly supportive of their point of view.
(And if you, dorogie druzhia [dear (Third Rome) friends], think that the creepy and cynical Mr. Zuckerberg will come to your rescue when the Putin secret police knocks at your door, think twice).
No comments:
Post a Comment