A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Californication, Disneyfornication, Googlefornication...

 

YouTube! Edward Abbey once is supposed to have said that "[s]ociety is like a stew. If you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top”. YouTube and other social media prove the truth of that quote every second of every minute of everyday thanks to their generally vacuous, mundane, banal, and at best, mediocre recraperation videos. Scum, as social media shows, generally does indeed rise to the top.

Quakers, of course, have long talked of the need of speaking truth to power. In thie era of continuing mediocrity and of mediocrates slumming for monies on YouTube, which, in turn, makes monies off of the banal, the mediocre, the mundane, and the ill researched videos they broadcast--lest we forget, YouTube is home of never ending if more readily available digitalised opium--it is long past time to speak truth to those who believe and those who enable videos grounded in the fallacious notion that anything said is worth saying. It isn't. Of course, I do realise the quantity of quality digital media is, historically speaking, no less or no greater than the quantity of quality books, television, or movies. There isn't much quality anywhere in the mass media world. The crap, however, is more widely spread on the stale bread producing hallucinations that is social media. And nowhere is this fact more in evidence in the core nation world than in the not so mythical kingdom of media bread and circuses, the USofA, that home of Califonication, Disneyfornication, and now Googlefornication. 

Golly gee that is something to be proud of. I hope the employees of Google, land also of paternalistic censorship, are basking in the glorious and radiant heat of their brown hole sun.