Entries tagged "social network"

127 Hours, loss, and tequila bar wisdom

 

photo: Chris Applegate 

I saw the film 127 hours last week. It made a big impact on me. (I liked it a lot more than Social Network. It’s a very interior film and will take you as well as a virtual thing can, to a place of feeling what matters about being alive to you. Log line: a climber cuts off his own arm to survive. Spoiler below).

 

I was in a bar last night and found myself talking with someone very tall visiting Toronto from Vancouver. Did I mention that this bar’s specialty was serving just tequila and making mid-town professionals comfortable on a night off? It wasn’t really my scene.

 

I mentioned the film. This woman sharply zeroed in her energy and delivered the pinnacle scene to me: “I made that boulder. I made this moment. This boulder has waited it’s entire life for me…” She hasn’t seen the film but a friend did and he told her about it. This friend saw the film a few days after this happened to him:

 
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WITH contd – Hey, social media commentators: It’s about us stupid.

Alex Madrigal, The Atlantic’s tech writer, has a really nice response to Zadie Smith’s critique of both the film Social Network and facebook itself and its meaning.

Madrigal is hitting on the main thing that most social media phobic critiques miss (eg. Jaron Lanier, Gladwell and Sherry Turkle’s upcoming book which I had the chance to respond to at a recent conference at Bard): the technology is made by us. Us people. Our relationship needs and issues exist without and with the technology.So what is it we are going to do about it? Alex Madrigal mentions a need for a kind of “urban planning” to make facebook and social media better. This is like the idea Stowe Boyd had a while back to approach social media like architecture.  Ross Douthat today commented in the New York Times on Madrigal’s Atlantic comment on Zadie Smith’s NY Review of Books piece saying he weighed in on the side of Madrigal’s call for “mastery” of social media rather than avoiding it.

 

And even if these publications weren’t finally online and blogging they’d still have esteemed writers writing about each other and people would talk to each other about it and hey, that sounds an awful lot like social media and the Internet, only slower.

 

I disagree entirely with Douthat’s framing of the question or Smith’s that our challenge is about “how to remain human in a social media world.”  Our challenge is how to be connected to our humanity with or without social media.

 

Ross Douthat and Zadie Smith why are you so sure we have more human-ness before social media rather than after?

 

Dissociation is easy to come by. I did it with books for years. Does it make that act less real than when it’s done with a screen? You can do it with a drink, a thought, a snort, a fuck. You can check out and not see others or feel your own basic impulse extremely easily. Intellectuals are as good at this as anyone. Whether you got a PhD for your method of checking out or the delirium tremens our need is to fell what it is we really feel and to be able to handle those feeling, thus developing enough as people to be able to handle and see and enjoy what is in others too, including what is different.

 

I believe the real question we face is: how can we be ourselves and be ourselves together. How can we be WITH each other?

 

And I believe that social media is part of a major change in our getting closer to this. Because people who have only been able to manage analytically are getting forced to reconnect to the relational and the relational is getting translated into data where the analytical can understand it.


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