Sylvia Paull: I might have to agree with my friend Andrew Keen‘s (“Cult of the Amateur“) assessment that the digital often abases rather than elevates what is best in humanity.
That would explain so much, including the fervor whipping itself into a froth even as we speak—oh, don’t worry if you miss it, there’ll be a new froth along any minute. One hardly wants to grant the fervor-of-the-day with the dignity of a name.
Let’s just say, Parental Approval of the President’s address to school children should be required … if you are a fucking racist. If you’re afraid out of your mind of a black man. If you never graced the doors of an institute of higher education, and hell, even if you did. But really, the lethal admixture of stupidity and fear does seem to accompany a certain … unelightenment? Little pockets of culture—and I use the term loosely—where Difference equals Frightening and Bad. For no goodreason at all.
Honest to Christ, you people don’t deserve to be called citizens. Get a clue. Study, how about this, the tenets of Christianity.
On the Internet, a social relationship is based on shared interests in cultural artifacts such as movies, music and social causes. In meatspace, as John Perry Barlow calls the analog world, a social relationship is based on time spent together over food and drink, or sports and outings, with friends, maybe family, while sharing ideas, one’s sorrows and joys, one’s hearth. A face-to-face social relationship may last but a minute, or a lifetime, and unlike the digital variety of relationship, its value cannot be calculated. Which is why, on the Internet, much of what is real doesn’t count. And why the drive toward monetization of “social relationships” on the Internet might be based on real data streams signifying nothing.
Signifying an essential debasement of all that is human, just as advertising and public relations do. Feeding on human behavior as a source of profit. Nothing new about that. It’s just getting rapidly more odious. We reveal what we care about with our clicks, and that valuable data is harvested and sold. Little pieces of you.
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we’re sorry, your ass cannot be monetized as it has not been validated. please try again later.