I've been thinking a lot about culture. Culture is so hard to escape. Impossible actually. I don't really like the way culture has gone. Why does our internet culture promote complaining all the time and being insensitive. It's so mean sometimes. It's a destructive force sometimes. When the internet teams up to shame someone for making a tiny mistake, like i watched a ted talk about how Justine Sacco's one tweet ruined her entire life because people didn't get her joke. She was being sarcastic and no one got it and those who did and tried to speak out also got called racist because they were in the minority. I don't know what I'm going about because at this point I'm just repeating what others have said. My view is very narrow. Culture is a huge thing with many many subcultures with different values and expressions so I don't really know what I'm talking about... so many layers... See, when people complain about culture (music these days is so bad, modern art sucks, etc) they're not actually attacking what they are complaining about, they are attacking a way simplified and two dimensional projection of it that lives in their heads. Actually culture is a thing that lives in peoples' heads but it's too big and each person can only actually see in detail a tiny part of it, but that's not what I was gonna say.
I guess I would be the same. I'm too unwilling to wrong anyone to criticize anything. But still I feel like culture these days, at least mainstream culture is so... idk, the attitude is all wrong. Culture is so obsessed with criticizing others. It also feels like it's cheap and repetitive. I just can't have fun participating with culture anymore because it feels so pointless to me. I turned the tv on and there's always at least two channels with like a divorce court show or something. And there's some game shows some sitcoms and like some show about celebrity news or whatever. idek. But like what's the point?? It's soo pointless and apparently people watch stuff. People think I'm childish for watching the PBS Kids but honestly it's so much more... morally pure? I've also watched the world channel more and more.. what have i been missing on that thing? so much stuff there. independent documentaries, glimpses into places and lives I've never witnessed or experienced or known or comprehended before. And then all the happy commercials trying to be happy but it feels like a parody of the actual thing, happiness.
The internet is even harder to say anything about in this context. Am I the only one who hates those "so relatable" posts? When I first got a social media account, these posts intrigued me so much.. They made me feel not alone I guess. My whole life I've been isolated and the internet opened up this whole new level of connectedness. Those posts were like, the small things that the internet noticed and decided to summarize in a neat little posts. But these seemingly common things or so-called first-world problems aren't very relatable at all considering the number of people who need to struggle to barely scrape together a living every day. At the end of the day, many of these posts are just people complaining about things that matter so little. These posts are so unsensitive and when I realized it I felt so guilty. Why is it that people pay attention to these things and not the important things in life? In some ways culture just serves to distract people from what's important.
And as you spend more time in the internet, you start to see the rules and the patterns. Culture is better at noticing some things than other things. It tends to notice completely arbitrary and completely unimportant things. You see that the simple act of defining and describing something changes that thing. The internet is obsessed with pointing out things that you'd otherwise probably not notice on your own. And when you notice things their nature changes. And then your life becomes... crystallized. Fossilized. I don't know. The mystery and unknown is just.... killed. Previous to the beginning of my internet citizenship, I didn't have such things to define the things in my life and I lived in a muddle.... you know, I really miss that muddle. It just feels different. And with my personal discovery of the wealth of information on the internet, it was all so new and fresh you know? It's exciting. With this new discovery came the foolish over-confidence. Like, I know stuff now! I have the internet now! I have learned stuff via this magical info-space and now I am an ascended being!! ..It's funny. Have you ever noticed how there's an inverse correlation between confidence and competence? Me, an amateur interneteer (i just coined a word) learning new stuff at a fast rate gaining confidence at that fast rate. But as you gain competence, you begin to realize that you haven't even begun to understand, not at all. Not at all....
But then, there comes this point when suddenly you emerge, you realize that you haven't been expanding your view by learning, you haven't been growing and maturing... in fact, you've grown more and more increasingly dependent on a glowing rectangular machine. Creating an illusion of expanding your world when actually your world has become more and more and more restricted until it's just a screen. And like all addictions, you are left wanting more but never satisfied. Because once you've seen what's on the internet that you couldn't ever get the chance to experience in person, you become acutely aware of how stuck you are in life. The same cycle of being a student, or maybe if you're an adult, work.
Actually, all music, literature, art, games, are to some extent addicting. Art just has a tendency to make you feel so small. The thing is that the internet is the tool for accessing anything you want. but it's not the same as seeing it in person. When you see some things on the internet (or in a magazine or on tv) it's not actually the thing itself you're seeing, it's more like you're seeing a description of it or a representation of it. Obviously this doesnt apply for music or literature but in the case of literature, I think there's something about having a physical copy of the book that just can't be replaced.
Wait I got it. What I think I'm trying to say is the media makes us lose sight of the scope of the world. Creating an illusion-space, calling attention to small pointless things rather than big important things, and it makes you feel better than you are. Obviously it depends how you choose to use the internet and media and stuff. Idk. Maybe what I'm actually trying to say is that entertainment these days makes us lose scope of the world. But then that's being kind of grinchy because life is about fun. And if you don't have fun, then life isn't fun. So maybe the problem is too much fun, resulting in it being not fun anymore. You can't have fun all the time or else fun isn't fun. So as society keeps trying to have more fun, our perceptions of reality will become more and more diminished. Then we're screwed. You know what terrifies me? When virtual reality becomes more and more of a thing, what is going to happen when people decide that they like their virtual reality more than the actual one? Then we're screwed.
What am I even doing. I can't afford to spend time thinking too hard because it will only distract me more from what matters. And I am the world's biggest hypocrite so I'm just going to stop now.
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