Vibes And Pressure

For the last few years I’ve been strongly fighting peer pressure to join Facebook.

From its introduction to the mainstream about 5 years ago I’ve had my suspicions about this website but I hadn’t really got a good enough argument, except that I had a feeling that there was something wrong about it.

But eventually, 4 months ago, I gave in, with the reason that my assumptions about it all were based on theory not experience, just like those who criticise books they’ve never read.  So I swallowed my pride and took the plunge and set up a Facebook account, albeit in disguise as a bag of rice with a false name.

Privacy is an issue for me so I ignored all the sections available to input my interests and hobbies and ignored the random requests for friendships from friends of friends.  Then I had to write my first status update.

What would I write?  It had to be something ‘cool’.  Something witty that would ingratiate me to my new public.

 

Unfortunately I did not record this audacious moment, but I do remember getting enthusiastic enough to post about 4 or 5 things in succession, unaware of the unsaid etiquette of not posting more than one or two things within a few hours of each other.  Eventually realising this rule I rationed my posts, saving interesting videos for the next day if I’d already just posted something.

One of the things I came to notice about Facebook is the amount of information that is presented for ingesting.  I ended my Facebook life with a modest 14 friends, which meant I wasn’t inundated with too much information – in fact I was left a little hungry at times – however, I can imagine for someone who has 200 friends, or for one of my ‘friends’ who had 2000 friends, the amount of information one is presented with, each day, must be astounding.  The question is what happens when we are confronted with such an information glut?

What I found was that information lost its depth.  Something was posted, watched, maybe commented on then it was quickly lost as the next mouthful of information was thrust in my direction.  I quickly concluded that Facebook is not the best place to inform anyone of anything meaningful.  It’s a good place to share cute kittens and weird fat men dancing to techno.  Anything deeper is often taken equally as superficially as the kittens and fat men because it all merges into one constant stream.

Another affect I found that Facebook had on me was changing the way I thought.

I found myself thinking a lot about Facebook, even when I wasn’t on it.  What was I going to write next?  How would I write it? Who would be impressed and how could I impress the most people?  From this I’ve discovered that I do not have the personality for using Facebook in a casual way.

Some people can use Facebook in a casual, light way, but I currently possess an extremely fragile ego that needs tons and tons of recognition and acceptance from my fellow man for me to feel good about myself.   And I crave attention.  This of course is an unhealthy way to exist and the task that is at hand for me is to break this habit and feel happy enough in myself to not need this esteem.  Facebook, however, is like nicotine.  But it’s not like a strong B&H, it’s more like a silk cut ultra, and I found myself going back and back for more to get the hit I wanted and knew I could get if I just said or did the right thing.  In fact I did get a good hit at one point by posting an animation I made.  And just to get every last ounce of juice I could from the praise I received I went back several times to look over the comments that people had left.

Facebook is bad news if you need the esteem of other people to feel good about yourself – which, it seems, could be nearly everyone in western civilisation. 

 

Facebook is also a con.  It is not a social networking site, not anymore anyway.  Facebook wants to know what’s on your mind so that they can advertise that very thing back to you.

It’s a ‘focus group’ on a phenomenal scale.  Like vampires, the marketers feed off our updates and shares so they can better understand what it will take to manipulate us into buying things we don’t need.  There is a way you can turn the adverts off but sometimes the pages won’t work properly.

In fact unless you do everything Facebook says they will make it very difficult for you to use it.  One of my friends had the experience of his interface changing to Timeline without his permission.  There was nothing he could do, it seems, except submit to this new way of using the network.  In another anecdotal incident a change in group settings ‘dictated’ (their word) that the user perform a labour intensive task that didn’t have to be done before.  This is internet dictatorship.

 

Even in my own experience as I deactivated my account they wouldn’t let me go without telling them why I wanted to leave.  And when you do want to leave Facebook uses guilt to try and keep you hooked, showing picture of friends that will ‘miss you’.  How absurd and creepy!  The fact that my account is never deleted, and I can always reactivate it just by logging back in, should send huge alarm bells off to us all about a more sinister intent of Facebook.

I’ll be strong enough to resist reactivation I hope because I believe that Facebook is an unwholesome way to communicate and is detrimental to the way we interpret reality and connect with each other.  It encourages superficiality, narcissism, self-obsession, snooping, judging, takes up huge amounts of time and dramatically increases time spent on the internet, and it give the impression that you are staying in contact with friends, but because of this illusion I found that I actually communicated with them less, opting instead for sharing status updates that revolved around me.

Of course, just like any drug, it has its upsides and there are useful functions, but we survived for millions of years without it and its overall effect, in my opinion is a detrimental one.

We need to deeply consider the effects of this new way of communicating.  It certainly makes things easier but is that always a good thing?  And what will the consequences for our relationships be if we continue to use this very superficial way of connecting with others?

Thank you for reading.

 

P.S.  Pass this on the old fashioned way if you found it interesting.

 

This is an excerpt from a book I’m studying at the moment called The Culture of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch in which he sums up consumer culture beautifully. It was written in 1979 about American culture so some of his examples, especially towards the end, are a bit dated but I think his ideas can easily, and worryingly, be transferred to present day Britain.

The Chapter is called “The Banality of Pseudo-Self Awareness: Theatrics of Politics and Everyday Existence.”

The sub heading is “The Propaganda of Commodities.”


“In the early days of industrial capitalism, employers saw the workingman as no more than a beast of burden – ‘a man of the type of the ox,’ in the words of the efficiency expert Frederick W. Taylor. Capitalists considered the worker purely as a producer; they cared nothing for the worker’s activities in his leisure time – the little leisure that was left to him after twelve or fourteen hours in the factory. Employers attempted to supervise the worker’s life on the job, but their control ended when the worker left the factory at closing time. Even when Henry Ford established a Sociological Department at the Ford Motor Works in 1914, he regarded the supervision of the workers’ private lives merely as a means of making the men sober, thrifty, industrious producers. Ford’s sociologists attempted to impose an old-fashioned Protestant morality on the labour force; they inveighed against tobacco, liquor, and dissipation.

Only a handful of employers at this time understood that the worker might be useful to the capitalist as a consumer; that he needed to be imbued with a taste for higher things; that an economy based on mass production required not only the capitalistic organisation of production but the organisation of consumption and leisure as well. “Mass production”, said the Boston department store magnate Edward A. Filene in 1919, “demands the education of the masses; the masses must learn to behave like human beings in a mass produced world… They must achieve, not mere literacy, but culture.” In other words, the modern manufacturer has to “educate” the masses in the culture of consumption. The mass production of commodities in ever-increasing abundance demands a mass market to absorb them.

The American economy, having reached the point where its technology was capable of satisfying basic material needs, new relied on the creation of now consumer demands – on convincing people to buy goods for which they are unaware of any need until the ‘need’ is forcibly brought to their attention by the mass media. Advertising, said Calvin Coolidge, ‘is the method by which the desire is created for better things.’ The attempt to ‘civilise’ the masses has now given rise to a society dominated by appearances – the society of the spectacle. In the period of primitive accumulation capitalism subordinated being to having [my italics]; the use value of commodities to their exchange value. Now it subordinates possession itself to appearance and measures exchange value as a commodity’s capacity to confer prestige - the illusion of prosperity and well-being. “When economic necessity yields to the necessity for limitless economic development,” writes Guy Debord, “the satisfaction of basic and generally recognised human needs gives way to an uninterrupted fabrication of pseudo-needs.”

In simpler times, advertising merely called attention to the product and extolled its advantages. Now it manufactures a product of its own; the consumer, perpetually unsatisfied, restless, anxious, and bored.
Advertising serves not so much to advertise products as to promote consumption as a way of life. It ‘educates’ the masses into an unappeasable appetite not only for goods but for new experiences and personal fulfilment. It upholds consumption as the answer to the age-old discontents of loneliness, sickness, weariness, lack of sexual satisfaction; at the same time it creates new forms of discontent peculiar to the modern age. It plays seductively on the malaise of industrial civilisation. Is your job boring and meaningless? Does it leave you with feelings of futility and fatigue? Is your life empty? Consumption promises to fill the aching void; hence the attempt to surround commodities with an aura of romance; with allusions to exotic places and vivid experiences; and with images of female breasts from which all blessings flow.

The propaganda of commodities serves a double function. First, it upholds consumption as an alternative to protest or rebellion. Paul Nystrom, an early student of modern marketing, once noted that industrial civilisation gives rise to a “philosophy of futility,” a pervasive fatigue, a “disappointment with achievement” that finds an outlet in changing the “more superficial things in which fashion reigns.” The tired worker, instead of attempting to change the conditions of his work, seeks renewal in brightening his immediate surroundings with new goods and services.


In the second place, the propaganda of consumption turns alienation itself into a commodity. It addresses itself to the spiritual desolation of modern life and proposes consumption as the cure. It not only promises to palliate all the old unhappiness to which flesh is heir; it creates or exacerbates new forms of unhappiness – personal insecurity, status anxiety, anxiety in parents about their ability to satisfy the needs of the young. Do you look dowdy next to your neighbours? Do you own a car inferior to theirs? Are your children as healthy? As popular? Doing as well in school? Advertising institutionalises envy and its attendant anxieties.

The servant of the status quo, advertising has nevertheless identified itself with a sweeping change in values, a “revolution in manners and morals” that began in the early years of the twentieth century and has continued until the present. The demands of the mass-consumption economy have made the work ethic obsolete even for workers. Formerly the guardians of public health and morality urged the worker to labour as a moral obligation; now they teach him to labour so that he can partake of the fruits of consumption. In the nineteenth century, elites alone obeyed the laws of fashion, exchanging old possessions for new ones for no other reason than that they had gone out of style. Economics orthodoxy condemned the rest of society to a life of drudgery and mere subsistence. The mass production of luxury items new extends aristocratic habits to the masses. The apparatus of mass promotion attacks ideologies based on the postponement of gratification; it allies itself with the sexual “revolution”; it sides or seems to side with women against male oppression and with the young against the authority of their elders. The logic of demand creation requires that women smoke and drink in public, move about freely, and assert their right to happiness instead of living for others. The advertising industry thus encourages the pseudo-emancipation of women, flattering them with this insinuating reminder, “You’ve come a long way, baby” and disguising the freedom to consume as genuine autonomy. Similarly it flatters and glorifies youth in the hope of elevating young people to the status of fully fledged consumers in their own right, each with a telephone, a television set, and a hi-fi in his own room. The “education” of the masses has altered the balance of forces withering the family, weakening the authority of the husband in relation to the wife and parents in relation to their children. It emancipates women and children from patriarchal authority, however, only to subject them to the new paternalism of the advertising industry, the industrial corporation, and the state.*


*Family life, according to Nystrom, inherently tends to promote custom, the antithesis of fashion.

Please note. This is not an advertisement!

Thank you for reading and pass it on.

iRebel

I was shopping in the supermarket the other day and I looked over to a girl with bleach blonde hair and automatically began to imagine her life. I began making judgments about her choices and perceived circumstances. Then, as I’m consciously trying not to judge people at the moment, I stopped myself. I mean hmm who was shopping in Asda in the first place…

While I was reminding myself that we all are doing our best with the information that is available to us in the circumstances we are in and have been in, and we not all that different from each other deep down, I realised that when I make judgements about people I have to separate myself from them. They become ‘Those people’ instead of ‘Us’

Thinking about it I realised that I make judgements about people all the time and perhaps that was why I was feeling so isolated recently. Perhaps this feeling of disconnection was happening because I had had to separate myself from other people so that I could judge them without feeling guilty.

It then made me think about what happens when I judge aspects of myself. Do I separate aspects of myself from myself through making judgements about myself until there is hardly anything left of myself in myself… if that makes sense

Making judgements about each other is what separates us from each other, and I Guess I’ve been told that before in not so many words, but this time I actually understood it

And if this is the truth then it’s not surprising that most of the time the media encourages us to make judgements about other and we even use it as entertainment these days in programmes like Big Brother or X factor.

If we are going to take back the power then we have to reunite with each other and perhaps that means that we have to stop judging each other negatively, and maybe even positively?

Do you know what I mean?


iRebel

If you want to see some grade A brainwashing on terrestrial TV then make sure you turn to ITV1 at 8PM on Tuesdays…

Last Tuesday I was round my Dad’s house and we were sitting after dinner having a chat with the TV on in the background. In the middle of our conversation I was suddenly distracted by loud aggressive noises coming from the TV of a door being broken and police raiding someone house.

What I was witnessing was the weekly instalment of a programme called Cops With Cameras. I haven’t watched TV in a while, so maybe the desensitising effect of watching TV has worn off, because although I’ve seen programmes like this many times before this time I was shocked to see this kind of imagery being shown as entertainment and at prime time on a channel like ITV1.

With fresh eyes the programme struck me as absurd and sinister. Is this really what is considered entertainment these days? What happened to Cilla Black and Bruce Forthsyth? Family Fortunes is entertainment. Not policemen breaking doors in and frightening people out of their wits...

And it’s on for an hour.. every week! Come on man, how can anybody be entertained by this week in week out? (Although saying that 2.31 million people were watching last week!)

Apart from fulfilling a disturbing voyeuristic gratification it seems to me that this kind of ‘entertainment’ has another purpose. The reason why images of police raiding other people’s houses are being beamed into our brains is so that we are acutely aware of what will happen if we break the law. It seems kind of obvious. The outrageous part of it is that they have the audacity to do this under a flimsy guise of entertainment then stick it on at prime time on an established and perhaps respected channel like ITV1 - pre-watershed. And then to keep people interested they use well known media attention holding techniques (i.e. hypnotism) by having quick cuts, fast paced, shaky camera action and dramatic music, better known as Jolts that release pleasurable chemicals in the brain. (Check out the book by Dr Aric Sigman called Remote Controlled for more info about that.)

For me these programmes have taken on an even more sinister edge since I found out that anything written that is judged to be inciting any kind of illegal behaviour (excuse me but what about the freedom of speech) means that as activists the chances of police knocking down our doors could be a real possibility in the future.

I’ve written a strongly worded letter to ITV1 and I’ll let you know what they say…

Peace.


iRebel