Expected the usual YouTube documentary, surprised by the admission that the narrator didn't know what actually made him so uneasy about the social media phenomenon. The moment of silence may have been staged, but it was - for me, at least - remarkably effective. Yes, why do the social media make us so uneasy?
Kept me awake for hours. The moment of silence was effective, as said, but more intriguing is the fact that no answer to this question was offered. In other words, if you want an answer, hey, go and find it for yourself.
Fine. Start with the other moment of emphasis, when the narrator offers a contrast between a tool, which we are free to use, and social media, which is a tool that uses us.
Tool. Are we merely free to use a tool? Consider a basic tool, say a hammer. To use a hammer would require some nails, some wood, a design or plan to follow, and a placement for the result of our use of the tool. In other words, to use even the simplest tool would require a significant degree of social organisation, a ste-up that we would be obliged to conform to in order to be free to use our tool.
Now take a more central tool, say a steam engine. An extraordinarily useful tool in its time, that transform whole societies in a generation or so. For instance, consider railways: the level of speculation and investment, labour expended, whole nations transformed. And behind all this was the rise of the coal barons and the huge industrial complexes that made the track and the trains. Then we had the combustion engine, motor cars, trucks, huge ships, and the rise of the oil monopolies - which still exert enormous soicla, financial and political influence.
You can see that our freedom to use tools can be quite fundamentally determined by forces utterly beyond our control.
Now consider a tool closer in character to social media: television. We have licensed televison services in this part of the world, where possessors of television pay an annual sum towards the operation of a television service that was understood to serve the interests of its viewers. Elsewhere there is commercial television, which is provided free to its viewers while funded by an income from advertisement. A very successful arrangement: free to view if you didn't mind the occasional interuption to the entertainment. But who noticed that the provided entertainment never outshone the sparkle of the ads? Whoever noticed that they came to buy branded products rather than basic materials like washing powder or coffee? See? If you are not buying your entertainment, you are the product.
So, nothing new in social media on this score: ads on the tele, ads on the phone, what's new here?
The reason it is so hard to isolate what is new and unnerving about social media is because it is so obvious. Here's the core. In the documentary, a youth undertakes not to use his phone for a week. We see him lying on his bed staring at the ceiling, then staring at a window. OK, he's bored. It's as though the ceiling and the window are screens that are not providing him with information. See? The youth, for instance, does not know that you can look through a window, and that you can then decide what is to be learned in that way.
Education: trains you to accept second- third-hand information as sufficient knowledge, that fills you up with this information, textbook after textbook, and trains you to use this information, projects and exams. No matter at what level, education is information, and nothing else. See now that social media is merely an extension of this system, just more recycled information. And you can see why the narrator was so uneasy: he sensed he was already part of the social media universe, trained up long before he knew where it would take him. And his unease: I suspect it arises because he senses the strangeness, the otherness of the world outside that closed info sphere.
See now that the youth could not think for himself. Why? Consider the last time human beings thought for themselves, back in sixteenth century Europe, and the hundred years of religious wars that followed, that devastated large parts of the continent.
And the burden of the documentary - the reason I give it 6 stars - is the uncomfortable fact that each of us must decide for ourselves just what social media is and what our relationship to it should be. Maybe that will be the beginning of our control of that media...
Kept me awake for hours. The moment of silence was effective, as said, but more intriguing is the fact that no answer to this question was offered. In other words, if you want an answer, hey, go and find it for yourself.
Fine. Start with the other moment of emphasis, when the narrator offers a contrast between a tool, which we are free to use, and social media, which is a tool that uses us.
Tool. Are we merely free to use a tool? Consider a basic tool, say a hammer. To use a hammer would require some nails, some wood, a design or plan to follow, and a placement for the result of our use of the tool. In other words, to use even the simplest tool would require a significant degree of social organisation, a ste-up that we would be obliged to conform to in order to be free to use our tool.
Now take a more central tool, say a steam engine. An extraordinarily useful tool in its time, that transform whole societies in a generation or so. For instance, consider railways: the level of speculation and investment, labour expended, whole nations transformed. And behind all this was the rise of the coal barons and the huge industrial complexes that made the track and the trains. Then we had the combustion engine, motor cars, trucks, huge ships, and the rise of the oil monopolies - which still exert enormous soicla, financial and political influence.
You can see that our freedom to use tools can be quite fundamentally determined by forces utterly beyond our control.
Now consider a tool closer in character to social media: television. We have licensed televison services in this part of the world, where possessors of television pay an annual sum towards the operation of a television service that was understood to serve the interests of its viewers. Elsewhere there is commercial television, which is provided free to its viewers while funded by an income from advertisement. A very successful arrangement: free to view if you didn't mind the occasional interuption to the entertainment. But who noticed that the provided entertainment never outshone the sparkle of the ads? Whoever noticed that they came to buy branded products rather than basic materials like washing powder or coffee? See? If you are not buying your entertainment, you are the product.
So, nothing new in social media on this score: ads on the tele, ads on the phone, what's new here?
The reason it is so hard to isolate what is new and unnerving about social media is because it is so obvious. Here's the core. In the documentary, a youth undertakes not to use his phone for a week. We see him lying on his bed staring at the ceiling, then staring at a window. OK, he's bored. It's as though the ceiling and the window are screens that are not providing him with information. See? The youth, for instance, does not know that you can look through a window, and that you can then decide what is to be learned in that way.
Education: trains you to accept second- third-hand information as sufficient knowledge, that fills you up with this information, textbook after textbook, and trains you to use this information, projects and exams. No matter at what level, education is information, and nothing else. See now that social media is merely an extension of this system, just more recycled information. And you can see why the narrator was so uneasy: he sensed he was already part of the social media universe, trained up long before he knew where it would take him. And his unease: I suspect it arises because he senses the strangeness, the otherness of the world outside that closed info sphere.
See now that the youth could not think for himself. Why? Consider the last time human beings thought for themselves, back in sixteenth century Europe, and the hundred years of religious wars that followed, that devastated large parts of the continent.
And the burden of the documentary - the reason I give it 6 stars - is the uncomfortable fact that each of us must decide for ourselves just what social media is and what our relationship to it should be. Maybe that will be the beginning of our control of that media...