New Media as Vast Wasteland

Yesterday NPR’s All Things Considered included a rather humorous segment by Andrei Codrescu.  He had a rather amuzing and yet philosophical take on Google, Facebook and all this new media stuff. You can listen to it on NPR’s website, but here is a section that I found rather funny and interesting:

My regular e-mail now tells me I have Facebook messages, forcing me to go to Facebook, which is slow on account of the jillion egos battling for verbal-audio-visual attention. And when I get there I find some cute thing that it’s taken me years to ignore in real life, and I start wandering involuntarily among postings in the hope of something to get that sickly saccharine taste out of my mouth, and I find more cute – a real sugarplum tree made by millions of bored people. After that honey bath, I’m ready to Twitter in rude Anglo-Saxon.

The new media’s given me several new insights:

1. Most people have too much time on their hands;

2. Most people are passive receptacles for whatever goes by;

3. Most people are not bothered by redundancy – they can do the same thing three or four times in a row without feeling defrauded; and

4. Most people want to be recognized for something, even if it’s just dumb repetition.

Andrei Codrescu is a the editor and founder of the online journal Exquisite Corpse, a journal of “books and ideas.”

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