Or: When are people no longer people?
Yes, yes; the internet—the first great democratic medium, the complete facilitation of communication, the abundance of pornography—is a tool. Like so many tools, however, our masturbatory use of it trumps and thusly forgets the ground on which it was built; we are gathered here today to mourn the loss of human interaction and inner-monologue, the death of meaning in general. The cause of this rapidly growing gap in communication that has so far divorced humanity from itself that people decide to publish inner-thoughts as banal, superfluous, and possibly common such as “Wait. Does anyone actually think Vincent Gallo is sexy? And if so, why?” is the influx of self-creation social networks and judgment pathways. An artificially created universe of pictures and self-representation expands like the
If you don’t get your music taste just right on a dating website, your dream-date might pass you over in favor of the person who strategically hides his shameful Country Music admiration long enough for the obvious character flaw to morph into a “charming” or “adorable” quirk. The immediacy of the new social environment introduced by these types of media is also crippling to any real human interaction. After meeting someone in real life, you might search for their persona on Facebook to further “know” them and possibly add them to your repertoire of “friends”—but wait! What if the have mutual friends with your ex? Oh this is all so embarrassing and awkward! But again, wait! He might just be “Facebook-friends” with him, maybe it doesn’t mean everything.
And that’s the thing, really; it doesn’t mean anything.
Social networking websites create a fantasy-space for people to divorce themselves from who they truly are (though having stable split personas is difficult—I wonder if the users actually know themselves), and thus ironically prevent themselves from any meaningful communication that the internet facilitates so well. People, instead of being people, have morphed into grotesque internet-projections of themselves through which, with the advent of twitter, one can, in real time, create a relatively complete vision of his or herself at any given moment, at any given place (case in point: I don’t even know the person whose twitter I quoted, but I still know what he looks like and where he is when he chooses to say so), complete with those thoughts that we all undoubtedly think, but have the sense to keep to ourselves.
In protest, I deleted all the old internet-representations of myself that had been untouched for some time and had a real conversation with a living person on the street.
But his attention was divided.
He was “facebooking” on his iPhone.
