This will be the last post I make to my WordPress blog. I am moving everything over to Tumblr, which is a content-management system that better accommodates my style.
My new URL is seanbest.ca. My new RSS feed is here.
I would be grateful if you would update your bookmarks and feedreaders, and with a little luck I will never have to move platforms again…
What follows is an excerpt from an email exchange that I had with my friend Rob, who shares a similar interest in the perverse intersection of technology and social relations. As Rob correctly observes,
One of the big questions that web 2.0 fails to answer is, who wants to be so connected and why? Why are our blackberries always on? Are we complicit in our own hijacking of sociality? We seem to be–no one is forcing us to sign up to Facebook or Twitter. I think web 2.0 will remain alive only until people interrogate their own assumptions about what they’re getting from this new type of social interaction.
Some argue this is the next step in social interaction, but is it a step forward or backward? Will my facebook or LinkedIN profile supplant my CV or resume?
Our facebook profiles are our CVs, and twitter is but one more means for shameless self-promotion. What else do our friend lists, status updates, and funwalls say about us besides: “This is how fucking awesome I am, this is how many friends I have, here is all the fun shit I’m doing right now, and these are all my cool interests and hobbies.” Or, put otherwise, “My life is the fucking zeitgeist.”
We would do well to recall the sociological notions of the ‘best presentation of self’ and the dramatalogical construction of identity. Thinking critically, all of this self-promotion and “outing” of ourselves is merely a smokescreen for a generation that is profoundly insecure and, by way of compensation, needs to be constantly linked in.
As Debord would say, we’re running hard to keep up with the devalued signs of life. The postmodernists are right when they say that we should dispense with any notions of authenticity, cause the genuine article is a fucking relic. Not only is nothing ‘authentic’ anymore, but the word has now become meaningless. Just try to define it.
As far as I’m concerned, all we can do is save ourselves, one or two loved ones, and a pet. Leave the masses to their Facebook-powered social orgy. Seek whatever blend of freedom keeps you sane. Update your status, but do so with irony.
Sensing that the human voice is no longer adequate to deliver a lecture, and desperate to boost their ratings among a youthful demographic, the savviest of professors now rely on Powerpoint to do their classroom bidding. With each passing lecture comes the further maturation of technological proficiency within the pedagogic avant-garde.
Having evolved from monotonous and seemingly endless slideshows composed entirely of text, Powerpoint-lectures now appear naked unless ornately burdened with a curious mixture of transition effects that lack all subtlety and purloined images from the pen of Gary Larson. Still, the evolution is incomplete. Just recently, one brave professor dared to raise the bar that much higher by boldly experimenting with an irrelevant video-clip whose educational purpose shall forever remain unknown.
Watching our professors become awestruck in the presence of an arsenal of high-tech gadgets is akin to watching a babble of wide-eyed children tremble at the sight of the latest offerings from Mattel. In both instances one finds the same fanatical belief that, finally!, everything has changed and now anything is possible. Granted, new possibilities have emerged, most notable among them the potential for an electronic faux pas.
Remember this: In all Powerpoint-dependant lectures—no matter how well scripted—there is that inevitable, awkward moment when the professor, unwittingly captivated by the computerized spectacle of their own creation, confuses the skill of the software with that of their own.
