Continuing in the same vein of thematic ideal as last night, I desire to explore a little further our infatuation with images over reality. The images we seek to ensure placement in societal hierarchy, from the Ferrari to the Giant Pillowfight, to the increasing decorporealization of our social relationships. Social networking allowing us to “keep in touch with friends,” more often allowing us to take unrealistic peeks in on the lives of those we may not even talk to anymore. Those people we view are no longer the people we once knew, they are now mere representations of the reality. Yet, many of us are much more attached to our internet social network of friends than we are directly to their physical manifestations. Our photos of social gatherings and events become our fetish, their hyper-reality becoming more important than the unattainable event that is now forever in the past.

Social structure has intimately changed since the advent of the internet and increased geographical mobility via planes, trains, and automobiles. There was a point in history in which there was a greater and more intimate dialogue amongst humanity. I point as a cultural reference to the very popular television show from the 1950’s, The Honeymooners. The main characters in this show are best friends and neighbors. They were not best friends first, they became friends due to geographical and communicative scarcity. The dynamic was created where people who might have different ideals, thoughts, and motives would become fast friends because they were really all they had in the world. In the advent of the internet, we consistently search out facsimiles which represent the same ideals, thoughts, and motives that we do. We search for friends based on “keywords” to allow us to find people who already believe the same things we do so we don’t have to associate with anyone we might ever have to disagree with. The representation is always agreeable. When our only interaction is with the representation, we do not encounter half as much strife in social circumstances as we do when we encounter the actual person behind the representation. An example is a friend of mine, a female, who has many male friends that have been made via the internet. Her relationships with them seem normal when she is interacting with their representations, but then she always seems to be confused and feels awkward when she meets them in person and they try to make romantic advances to her. The reality is much less pleasing than the representation, holding the image at arms length, disallowing the hardship of having to actually cope with another human being and how they feel and react to us.

This new kind of social interaction creates a dangerous tipping point for humanity, further splintering us into smaller and smaller sects. It is evidenced by research that claims people feel they have less friends who they can confide in confidently than they did fifty years ago. This creates problems for a society that is supposed to be democratic, because each group feels further and further marginalized, not realizing the marginalization is brought upon themselves via overall social interaction and an unwillingness to have a thoughtful dialogue with those we disagree with. As the internet makes us more and more socially isolated, we are at risk of slowly disintegrating any true sense of community as the only community we have is the facsimile, the representation, the spectacle.

The Individual vs. the Hype Machine:
“Oh dude, you should have been with me when some people took me to this art gallery. I was just saying shit like ‘Most of these art pieces that you guys are raving about are only highly respected because people have heard a bunch of hype about them.’ You are all agreeing that this thing over here is totally awesome but you guys came in here by yourself one at a time and wrote down which were the best they’d be totally different. That’s the way it should be, you react to what speaks to you about whatever stupid shitty thing you’re going through.”

Tied closely to our commodity fetishes is the social hype machine which defines which fetishes are worthwhile to the community. Which fetishes will gain me the most status in my elite social hierarchy? Shall I be honest about my true interests or will those make me a social pariah in the group which I wish to be a part of? Just as the commodity fetishes of the hip/underground community are the “counter-culture” antithesis to mainstream capitalist society, the hype machine of the Industrial-Advertising Complex is mirrored by the underground with their own form of hype machine. Hand-made fliers and zines supplant TV commercials and the New York Times. Both sets are designed in their own way to influence our ideas about what is important to our culture.

I had a conversation with a different friend recently and I lamented the state of the Industrial-Film Complex, as I am often wont to do. Movies with thought and heart are more and more supplanted by films which are nothing more than successive explosions behind a pair of breasts running in slow motion. I mentioned how Roger Ebert had absolutely eviscerated Transformers 2 and the hard-headed absurdity endowed upon the film by the epic man-child Michael Bay. My friends argument was along the lines of: “Well, I’ve heard good things about it, and its making a huge amount of money.” As if to say that a multi-million dollar marketing campaign, the timing of the release (4th of July weekend), and the film opening on almost 5,000 screens has absolutely nothing to do with the success of a film nobody has actually seen yet. The hype machine was in full effect leading up the success of this disaster of a film. We were told: “It must be good, otherwise there wouldn’t be so many cool looking commercials for it.” We were taught to think: “It can’t just be a ploy to sell toys. It can’t just be merely marketing.”

It is “merely” marketing. The ever prescient Bill Hicks was aware of just how malicious the hype machine of marketing is:

Can we blame it entirely on the hype machine or can part of this be turned inward in how we are, as humans, basically wired? Recent study shows that (relevant link to come soon), even when faced with evidence to the contrary, humans are overly willing to trust in someone who has confidence. Even when the person in question has been proven wrong time and time again, their confidence compels us to believe them. The hype machine uses this against us at every step in the process. Every commercial, every flier, every artist, every musician, most especially those who have no depth of meaning or an ounce of introspective thought, are intensely confident in their work and in what they are hyping. Try interviewing any of the musicians made famous by the Entertainment-Industrial Complex’s rampant ad campaigns pushed forward to make us believe they are worthwhile artists. Very few of them will be humble or consider their work to be something they are surprised so many people enjoy. Rather, they are intensely and almost disturbingly confident in this empty, thoughtless material which they produce. A prime example is a single song: American Idiot by Green Day. A song which exemplifies a want to be politically active in a period of time dominated by an American government intoxicated with power. However, the song has almost no depth and only goes as far as referring to the opposition as “the redneck agenda.” It does nothing to define their own agenda, in fact, the only agenda it seems to have is to be the antithesis to the popular agenda. However, so much confidence is exuded in this song that thousands line up to sing along and pretend they actually give a damn about political strife by buying a CD from a group which finances Lobbyists who will go to Washington D.C. and lobby to have stricter copyright laws, punishing artists who want to create derivative works and taking the ownership rights away from the artists they represent. It seems they have become so quickly part of their own baseless and empty agenda simply by singing along.

So, we have hype machines for every level of social groups. The question then is, as humans, will we learn to ignore the hype machines and instead rely on our own experiences? This is not to say we must shut out any particular thing, we must be willing to move forward with new and different experiences at all times. However, we must take our own experiences and thoughts and apply them to the new experiences, allowing our knowledge to shape how we perceive them. Will we ever achieve this? Or will we continue to be told by the hype machine what to think about a film/band/sculpture/painting/et cetera? Will we be able to disconnect from the image presented in the hype and instead once again appreciate the reality? Can we begin to ignore the Tweets and Text Messages and once again see each other as human beings and not lines of ever-shifting text and their associated photos?

I hope so. I fear if we do not learn to ignore the hype machine, what Guy Debord called the Spectacle, we will be unable to press forward with new ideas or ever be able to destroy governments that have broken their societal contract with the citizenry. We will be unable to push forward ideas that are different than the ones of those who are close to us. We will be unable to converse, we will only be endlessly talked at in the ether. A society of twitter fiends who limitlessly talk to themselves, never expecting a response, and never caring. A society on the perpetual cusp of schizophrenia.

Thus ends the plateau.