The point being: what I feel is not important. At least not to you. Even you with the exceedingly long nipples, well done, by the way, for making it out of the house – I’m proud of you. You could feed babies on the other side of the room. But, the Internet, and social media specifically are designed in such a way that your opinions, your pictures, your links, your everything are given centre stage. The paradox is that there are millions and millions of centre stages and the only member of the audience is a rather shiny mirror with a giant gold frame.

Some of you might have seen a documentary called Century of the Self, by Adam Curtis. This posits the theory that the idea of a self was not crystallised in human minds prior to the early twentieth century, where Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, used psychological techniques to further consumerism and influence people. For a very brief overview at Wikipedia, click this collection of linky letters. For a little more of an in-depth look, dive straight into this blue pool of linkage (The BBC’s page for Century of the Self). And, what with the wonders of free information, why not let your mouse hover over and chomp up these letters, which will allow you to download the entire documentary, for free. Don’t complain if you burn up your Internet.

Please bear in mind that my takeout from the documentary is almost as simplified as the plot to Twilight. So don’t kill me, or troll me, or start a flame war, or whatever it is that the Internet kids are doing now.

What we are seeing now, manifesting in the Internet is the evolution of this idea of the self. If or when you watch the documentary, you will see how the public had to be given this idea of the self. And then, they had to be taught that only by buying things, they could define who they were in relation to other people. The Century of the Self tells us that prior to this, humans only ever consumed what they needed. Am I guilty for owning 30 pairs of shoes. Yes. I am.

The Internet has evolved to meet this idea of the self and push it further than we could imagine. People celebrate themselves for no other reason than they are themselves. This doesn’t make sense to me. While one should certainly be happy with one’s self (I am happy with myself sometimes two, three times a day), I still don’t understand people’s need to blab so much. To literally cut themselves open and let it all pour out. I don’t like having your smelly, emo guts all over me, thank you very much. Perhaps because the Internet is so much more anonymous and there are less consequences than there are in real life, people are happier to air their dirty laundry without fear of recourse or someone looking at them funny with that slight sneer as if there’s a strange smell afoot.

Think of facebook status updates. I have seen more post-break-up wars of words than I care to count. And no one realises just how silly and childish they are. The same goes with overly emo status updates. No one cares that you’re upset, that you’re over it, that you quit or that you give up. Mentioning your dear Pep-pep that just died means nothing. Does your emotion only become validated when it is seen in a public forum? If there was no Internet would you have to run around in the streets with a sign around your neck (complete with an unhappy face, just to let people know for sure that you’re upset)? Or (and this is something that irritates me more than people trying to justify to me why Twilight has any merit whatsoever) are people just doing the old emotional fishing? This can take the form of fishing for compliments or fishing for sympathy. Either way it’s pretty lame. As soon as people fish for compliments or sympathy around me, I tend to ignore their pleas quick-smart.

I think it’s the assumption that your emotions, your insides, are worthy of public consumption that frightens me. I define myself (on the Intertubes and to a large extent in real life) by what I create, by what content I put forward. It doesn’t matter that I was the youngest person to reach the South Pole wearing only underpants and green nipple tassels, or that I entered the Winter Olympics for the antique pipe-smoking and typewriter abuse events and won gold at both (and had to get a really bad tattoo to let you all know that I was there). What matters is the content that I produce.

I define my value by what I can create. What I can bring into being from nothingness. My selfish hopes and dreams have nothing to do with any of you. You can ask me and if I feel like it, I might share some things with you, but I hope I will never overshare my personal life. It’s really not that interesting. And neither is yours. Even if you’re quirky and zany. And you know what? Even being kooky is not enough. What I’m interested in is your responses to things, big things, not the way your best friend’s ex-girlfriend totally likes you but you’re not sure if you should do her or not because bla bla bla bla, I’m sorry I couldn’t read any more of your self-serving blog because I was stabbing an oyster fork into my eyes.

I don’t even like oysters and I wear glasses. You can imagine the amount of effort needed to just undertake such an action.

Dear readers. There is a difference between blogging and writing. I am not a blogger. The democratisation of the Internet has been its biggest boon and its biggest bugbear. The idea that information and content can be created and shared by anyone is still one of the most exciting things I’ve ever come across. Just thinking about twitter makes my brain wet, when I consider what a thrilling, dynamic conversation it can be. It can also be a whole lot of emotional whining, or mind-vomit, don’t get me wrong. This democratisation has allowed anyone to start a blog, a place where they can share their talent with the world (if they have any). Or they can share pictures. If that’s their thing. I’m generally about as visual as Stevie Wonder. But please kids, stick to your talents. The piss-stained sepia look does not make your photos more arty, even if you’re pouting as best you can, sticking your neck out so that your double chin doesn’t show and standing with the biggest group of friends you can find, to prove how cool you are. Ditto black and white. Black and white photos should be left to the professionals. Or dogs.

You can become righteously indignant. Tell me I’m no better than you. That I’m a bastard for slapping the sunburn that is your personality. I’m just as boring as you are. I just recognise that I am. And anything I share in a public sphere I try to make interesting. Especially if it’s actually about me.

Yours (in parentheses),
Paul White

In the beginning there were the dinosaurs. They hunted or foraged during the day, for the most part, because even they could realise that at night they were more likely to bump into trees, rocks and eachother. Other than that they most probably saw little distinction between the times it was light and the times when it wasn’t. Then we came along.

Primitive man no doubt saw the difference between day and night. At daytime we could go outside of our caves, but at night it was dark, scary and cold. That’s when we made our first mistake. We distinguished between the two, and associated attributes to light and dark. The time when the sun was in the sky and we could wander around freely was essentially good, while night time became inherently bad.

This distinction was the most basic and profound mistake mankind would ever make, and it became the framework for how most of humankind would see the world, right until this day. Everything suddenly became divisible into one of two categories: good and evil. We constructed society, religion and the idea of nationhood around this one polarity, and it is our greatest weakness.

Ask yourself: have you ever met an “evil” person? I haven’t. I’ve met some thoroughly disagreeable people, and seen on TV those who are to be avoided in the interest of personal safety, but the distinction between good and evil is extremely difficult to quantify without coming up for a reason why your theory of what is “right” is wrong. More importantly, those qualities that we consider to be “good” are always internalised. We see ourselves as being in the “right”, and when something different from ourselves presents itself it is immediately seen as something else.

This sets up a polar relationship between “Us” being the good, righteous, freedom loving people of wherever, and “Them” the evil terrorists bent on the destruction of our way of life. This is extremely useful for a government. As George Bernard Shaw said: patriotism is the belief that your country is superior to all others by virtue of the fact that you were born in it. It is very easy to create a sense of national unity when there is a definite “enemy image” to cast that nation’s identity against.

National boundries, racial distinctions, class structures, even salary discrepancies are all arbitrary but very “real” differences (or rather, Derrida’s “Differance” that can be used to turn one group of people against another. This is why I say that “terrorists” are entirely constructed. There might be conflicting forces within a nation that have different ideologies, but these ideologies themselves are simply more arbitrary boundaries that people set up between themselves.

It is impossible for me to make you understand this unless you take it upon yourselves to actively dissolve millennia-old mental constructs. Why should you do this? Because then you will be able to see what our world has become.

More importantly, you will be able to see how unnecessary and just plain wrong most of the way our world has been depicted really is. When Bush or Cheyney stand up and say the word “Terrorism” a dozen times in a four minute speech, you will see a deliberate attempt at creating divisions and reinforcing the “Us against Them” dichotomy that keeps us all enslaved – instead of a rousing call to arms against what they would have us believe is a real enemy.

References:

Writing this article draws on many sources, some of which are reputable.  I am indebted, as always, to the masterful Peter Joseph’s Zeitgeist Movies (free download!), which don’t always contain the whole story, but show the fly the way out of the bottle.

Also, I regurgitate some of the work of Jacques Derrida, lovingly shoved down my throat by lecturers.  He is arguably the father of modern post-structuralism.

Lastly, there is a spattering of ideas from Edward Said and the philosopher, Hegel, without both of whom we might not know of the terrible things we do to one another in the name of our differences.

Your host

Norman Conquest