Sunday 10 December 2023

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: When Fantasy Became Real, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Limitedly Examined Life

 

I love those "kiddies" who spew fragments of their unexamined lives out for all to potentially see and hear on YouTube. They whinge and whine about petty little "unrealisms" in the very limited range of moving "entertainments" they watch, cliched mundanities that suggest that those who utter such banalities are constricted not only by limited experience and limited cultural capital but also by Freudian anal disorders. That the cinema they are whinging and whining about, much of it fantasy, nay hyper and uber fantasy--action adventure fantasy, fantasy fantasy, and science fiction fantasy--is as far from the realism or naturalism they claim to treasure, as far from realism as musicals, in fact, a genre they generally despise, doesn't seem to cross their limitedly active minds. One gets the sense from these social media "kiddies" that if they sat down and read Gogol's classic short story "The Nose", assuming they read classics of course--a huge assumption--that they would whinge and whine and scream and shout "oh come on, a nose would never detach itself from face and go slumming around Sankt Petersburg living the life of a state councillor", a title they wouldn't do research on because they don't do research or they want you to post the answer on their reaction page so they can make monies. As a consequence of their limited understanding of art one supposes that these social media "kiddies" would likely find a slice of life masterpiece like Olivier Assayas 2008 Summer Hours "boring", though, in fact, like many of the films of Eric Rohmer, Summer Hours is far "realer" than the fantasies they are devoted, in a groupie sort of way, to. And that, dear reader says all you need to know about the contradictory stream of consciousness that operates across the little grey cells of most "kiddie" "reactors" on social media. All hail the not so examined life where "boring" is not in the socialised eye of the beholder but out there some where in FetishLand.

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