Twitter, which recently came on the scene, is a fascinating enigma which I have yet to decipher. I feel compelled to check it everyday. I've checked it twice since writing this entry. And the only reason I can even point out that compulsion is because it's new (whereas calling attention to my need to check email and Facebook is about as eventful as my need to sleep or eat dinner.) Soon enough, Twitter will solidify it's cultural foothold and settle in somewhere between breathing and doing laundry, and tweens will laugh at me for only having one update per day. Thanks to my frie
nd Lauren, who recently informed me that her life goal is to be a Twitter Jedi, I now know that it's a verb, with it's own book of new words sure to make their way into Webster within the decade [twitter.pbwiki.com/Twitter%20Glossary]. Stepping back from my compulsion, so far it's only value for me is in it's existence as a perfect metaphor for American culture. We have to know what's going on, right now, and we can never be too up-to-date.You can follow everyone: John McCain, Dennis Rodman, your neighbor, your neighbor's 12-year-old daughter. It's an addiction for a lot of people, on the road to becoming a full blown condition, like obsessive Facebooking. They did a whole 2-minute package on it yester
day on the CBS Nightly News (who you can also follow on Twitter). But when you get down to it, the content is... meaningless. John McCain just wrote a bill. Dennis Rodman just drove home. Your neighbor just wacked off. Is this our definition of meaningful content? Who cares? You do. And you can't escape it. The internet is an enabler of our addiction to immediacy. And we've managed to accomplish something so immediate that it's inane: it's the ultimate simulacrum. It's everything we want, but nothing at all. Baudrillard would have written novels on it.
I hear this argument all the time, that things are getting shorter and faster to accommodate for shrinking attention spans. I filmed a doc at the Creation Museum on Friday and their director told us they did away
with most of the text placards that have become requisite outside museum displays, in favor of short videos that play in every room, because "people won't stand and read a big block of text, but they will stand and listen to a 2-minute video". So, they spent an additional $20,000 on flat screen TV's for... people's attention. Finally! Someone's put a price on it.Americans have made ourselves into one big paradox. Why are we so obese? Many experts say because we don't take our time to eat, like the French. Why are we in massive debt? Because we want it now and credit provides a way to do that. But at the same time, we've created a culture of such over-stimulation that, for our urgent need to slow down, Ritalin is like a speed bump and Botox is like a Band-Aid on a broken leg. Debord called it our "Society of Spectacle".
Consumerism is our collective religion. Mass media has created itself (yes, it's out of our hands) as your solitary form of gaining information, and oftentimes treated as your only method of communication. Take it as a microcosm: the world is your body and media is your brain. Imagine if the conscious part of your brain went all I-Robot and figured out that it could think for itself independently of the rest of your subconscious brain, and other parts of the body started paying it to insert little subconscious message
s into you that will benefit it: your hand pays the brain to make you buy some nice lotion, your feet pay the brain to buy some new Nike's. Every once in a while, the subconscious part of your brain (you) figure out what's going on...but there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. You can't get rid of your brain, being the center of communication for your body and the thing that holds everything together.That might be an absurd representation, but that's where we are with media. It's destroying us, but we cannot live without it. It's everything we want, but satisfaction is always a dollar away.
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