Tag: Marshall McLuhan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?featureplayer_embedded&vd0TmXRrDpP8 Not a massive fan of Tegan and Sara and their folkiness and had mixed views about the whole Tyler vs Tegan controversy, but after watching the second episode of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror this quote from the recent Stereogum interview struck a chord: Tegan said something recently that really hit home with me. She said something about how we can make change and inspire people and do it without being hateful. I know that that sounds so like “mean people suck,” 1990s Woodstock mumbo jumbo, but it’s fucking true. I don’t want to get to the end of my life and die thinking that I was a piece of shit. I want to get to the end of my life and think like, “God, I may fade into the background and people make fun over me in 10 years, 50 years, 20 years, maybe they won’t remember me in the next generation but now, I want my legacy to be about goodness … and I want those things that we do an daily basis to be good and positive. And I just feel like that’s what we need more of and I don’t think in order to be inspiring or to be a visionary you have to be an asshole. Yes there's something really fucked up with that; the idea you have to be Jeremy Clarkson or Simon Cowell or even Malcolm McLaren, people who use people or insult minorities and people who can't defend themselves. In this reality saturated times, quite a lot of people are choosing to be evil, nasty, bitchy and whatever to get ahead, focusing on the negatives. Be or be killed. Gordon Gecko. Gonna get mine....and I thought the second Black Mirror indeed held up a mirror in classic sci-fi style (as well as some major digs I think at the whole Zeitgeist/resource economy BS which is dystopia and the same-old in the making, no true revolution which is needed to stop the 1% from destroying the world, no it's the 99% that has to feel the pain, die, change their ways...it was ever thus) to this nasty Perez Hilton style celebrity culture, where people are just used and abused for entertainment... And although it's partly human nature (schadenfreunde) it's also a lot to do with the new technology, the blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, the oxymoronically titled social media. It's easier to say something witty and bitchy in 140 characters than something inspiring without resorting to Hallmark platitudes, Shades of grey get filtered to black and white. Glenn Beck bloggers try to get attention like a modern version of s shock jock...with the mass sea of opinion out there, you need to be way out to get 30 seconds attention, let alone 15 minutes - Marshall McLuhan was generous with the timings for that one! So people enlarge their online and offline personas, go to extremes...but this has in turn influenced broadcast media as they scramble for viewing figures - hence the Glenn Becks, the Perezs, the Clarksons, people who are relied on to shock (but nothing too much, nothing that really shakes the status quo and the fucked up nature of the machine). New media will eat itself...and it becomes a sort of reality (game show). I hoped podcasting and truly socially generated media and news would destroy this cabal, the Murdochs et al - but no, they just adjusted their roles into being gatekeepers for the New Media World Order. What happened to being inspiring? Revolutionary? Bolshy, bratty yes...punk was but mostly not nasty in this cynical modern sense...sticking two fingers up at the established order is not what I mean by such rudeness...it's more treating people as commodities, and serving out doubleplusungood glop for them to consume. And getting ahead by being an arsehole, as we say here.

Tag: Marshall McLuhan

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Tag: Marshall McLuhan

Black mirror / being an asshole

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