I was listening to a Hal Sparks on a progressive radio
station in Chicago a couple days ago. Like all good progressives, Sparks is a delusional
civilization apologist who believes that global post-industrial society reflects
the material bloom of the creative human spirit—the global machine is our manifest
destiny. He is also a flaming technophile, the kind to whom the “fetish”
connotation of the term truly applies.
He began his program by singing the praises of twitter. There
are those who insist that twitter (electronic social networking in general) is
simply a tool for deepening our narcissistic self-absorption, and that the
content of a typical tweet lowers the bar for banality. But not Hal. For
Sparks, “twitter is about community”.
Seriously.
We are designed for life in tribal society where we would have
regular meaningful interaction with a sizeable number of people,
Sparks says. But most of us, as we
trudge through the daily grind of work and family, have meaningful interactions
with maybe a half dozen or fewer people on a regular basis. Twitter (and facebook and etc., ) allows us
to transcend the limitations of physical proximity and establish true community
with numerous others.
Exchanging electronic signals with anonymous strangers is
community.
Fresh water comes from a machine.
I think I’m beginning to see a pattern here.
“By 2050—earlier, probably—all real knowledge of Oldspeak
will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been
destroyed [and] exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into
something different, but actually contradictory of what they used to be.” --George Orwell
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