Popular Culture Part VIII: Social Media

A brief consideration of the impact of social media and modern technology on our experience of the world through popular culture.

[@cheri238]

Thank you, Professor Wes Cecil. I did not get a cellphone until about 4 years ago and I just never wanted one because I knew there would be pitfalls. I never have done Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tic-Tock, played games on one. My appeal was to listen to documentaries or learning things I loved from reading books or music, philosophy, sciences, poetry, literature or political science, painters, creative arts, religions. I do not have a notification ring , I pick and choose what I want or turn it off. I have a few courses I have to get through, but I will turn off news. Thank for your videos. 🙏❤️🕊🎶🎵

[@stress2558]

Very often when i read some nonsense sports article i forget it. When i come back a few days later i cant find it. I very nearly murder my phone, and i have twice. Its pure frustration that it used to show me something that it refuses to show me today. Im aware that my phone is not to blame at all. But i very nearly murdered it again today... thanks wes, i listened to your philosophy and history lectures for upwards of 1000 hours by now (at work). The one on walking and taoism especially run deep

[@trayvon4484]

Good Afternoon, Mr. Cecil. Over the time since the series has began, my perception of all things Pop-Culture has enabled moi to view it from a new mode, or framework; which allows me to comprehend it from different perspectives. You work is invaluable. Have a great day, Sincerely yours. -t

[@Great_Olaf5]

Okay Wes, this might be because I'm autistic, but when I'm in one of those restaurants with the TVs and the music and the noise of the other people and the smells and all the rest, you know what happens? Al of that goes away. It falls away into a background static while I focus on reading the menu, enjoying the food, and talking with the people I'm sitting with, or if I'm alone, reading something. I did my best work, the had the most focus, when I was in the cafeteria back in high school,, 500 students in one room, all talking, laughing, and eating and back then, that was the place I was able to get the most uninterrupted work done. Silence is distracting because silence doesn't exist, on a quiet walk in the woods, I get distracted from my thoughts by a bird chirping (not necessarily a bad thing), in a quiet room taking a test, I get distracted by the feel of my clothes on my skin, the scratch off pencil on paper, studying in a library, I get distracted by the buzz of the lights, by the rustling of papers, the quiet talk of other people studying in groups. Sometimes, silence is nice, it helps me focus, most of the time, I need enough simulation going on that the only way to focus on what I want is to push everything else out of the foreground, because if there's not enough to necessitate that, my divisa gets split between a dozen tiny things that most people probably wouldn't notice were even there. If I'm not careful, I can distract myself _from_ what I'm doing _by_ what I'm doing, my thoughts taking what I'm reading for class and going down a mental rabbit hole of what ifs, wouldn't it be cools, and I wonders so long by the time I've come up for air it's twenty minutes later and I'm still two pages into a thirty page reading for discussion class the next day.

[@theoeisenstein6870]

The resistance to getting the smart bricks brought forth a memory from an earlier lecture where, if memory serves me right it is mentioned that the PlayStation was given away. 2009 seems a bit arbitrary, or at minimum a multiple choice question that can be argued for future school classes. (The bit about Smartphones realizing their place)

[@newtonbhatta7769]

Thank you professor. I like all of your lectures. I quit college education some years ago but your videos are more helpful in learning.

[@ericvulgate]

I've had a smart phone less than two years now. I didn't want it bc I knew I'd be on it all the time, among other things. Tracfone stopp supporting my flip phone I'd had for ten years. They said I didn't have enough g's. I'm pretty sure the problem was that it didn't track our movements as well.

[@xbluebells]

Thanks for highlighting for me that Facebook reorders our stuff. This drove me crazy and I had to leave it Facebook alone. It made me feel as though I lack agency which as was a true fact.

[@sebastianweissbarth3385]

Thanks Wes!!

[@Thomas88076]

invention is the father of necessity

[@stress2558]

So are women

[@roberth9814]

I have several camping and hunting trips coming up. I like to use those as my media free weeks. Coming back from nature to podcasts and social media always is a bizarre feeling.

[@AustinStarr191]

Hunting? Really?

[@bluesbunny121]

The comparison with 1984 and the changing of the past is not really a good one for several reasons: 1. The party changed the past so that there will never be any doubt whether the party is wrong or not on any historical issue. The Party is always right and we have the past to prove it. Everything that the Party said happened, it did, so consequentially, everything that the Party says in the present is right and in the future will also be right. 2. Another reason to change the past was to make sure that undesirable people were erased from existence, for political reasons. 3. When you load any social media app, the algorithm just loads up all the posts that will get your attention, and as many NEW ones it can get there, the better, because those are more effective. So the new ones will replace many of the older ones. In my opinion, a better comparison would be with A Brave New World, where people were so distracted by pleasures and targeted information about reality, that they were incapable of being individuals anymore but also didn't want to.

[@baller1325]

one caveat of your students attitude towards paying for the jazz app could possibly come from growing up in a world with open source / creative commons as a norm where if there is no cost in copying it then we shouldn't necessarily charge for it

[@CarloFromaggio]

Thanks Wes, but I think this challenge you offer in its most distilled form goes too far. As someone who hates phones and phone/text culture, I never thought I would disagree saying, just turn your phone off. First, child and family responsibilities may make it unfeasible. Secondly, I have gotten the dreaded midnight phone call of a family members medical emergency. I never thought I would get one, and as expected it was horrible. Yet, if I hadn't of heard it ring I wouldn't be able to help the family member in need and the other family member on the phone. Limiting and omitting media is doable and refreshing. Dropping out of touch for a week (barring snail mail and the written word) could have consequences for a small percentage of people. But regardless, viva analog.

[@Autists-Guide]

I got as far as 45:27 and then turned off my laptop.

[@ipoopeveryday]

To go through this entire thing without ever explicitly naming capitalism and/or the attention economy is intellectually jarring and empty. I fear your work of late has been changing from more rigorous introductory philosophy to falling deep into pop-pseudo-philosophical self-help stuff, and not the good type. I worry that this channel is becoming more reactionary, nostalgic, and totalizing/universalizing. Not to mention that, when it finally gets to prescriptive takes, they are entirely focused on the individual's "responsibility" (particularly privileged individuals, and, even more particularly, individuals privileged in the realms of leisure time and accompanying energy). More directly to the substance of your focused prescriptive takes: Focusing too much on the classics, yes, reproduces the classics...which becomes equally boring, stagnant, innocuous, and obnoxious as contemporary pop culture as well.

[@rcmrcm3370]

You are on a platform where there are plenty of options.

[@ipoopeveryday]

@@rcmrcm3370 Cool? Great comment. Very original. Thank you. Same, I guess. The difference is: I care about THIS channel and the PHENOMENAL breadth and depth of life-changing knowledge it has provided me and so many in the past.

[@Tom-rg2ex]

It's kinda weird that your (inaccurate) criticism of this talk is that it's stagnant because he's not beating the same reductive drum of "because of capatilism!" that so many others have for 140 years. I find the sociological particulars brought up by Wes here to be much more interesting than the obvious stuff we already know that you take agendized chagrin to not being harped on further.

[@ipoopeveryday]

@Tom-rg2ex These "sociological particulars" you point to are neither new nor nuanced. If anything, they're part of the same rhetorical explanations which have been around for thousands of years (not just 140 years - a number I'm not sure from which you have derived). The specific points themselves are also the same anti-social-media-and-streaming-and-technology talking points that are spewed from CNN to foreign news outlets to middle schools to listicles to self-help gurus and beyond. As to your idea that just blaming things on capitalism and leaving it at that being reductive... I agree, of course. But Wes doesn't "leave it at that." Capitalism and its modern relationship with technology, however, is CERTAINLY the ROOT cause of all of this, and tracing the genealogy (something Wes praises on his own in this very talk about creating media based on the classical roots) of such a thing as we are critiquing here is vitally important, especially in filling in all the nuanced gaps from the root cause to the specified symptom(s) at hand. Otherwise, we get the same self-perpetuating Reaganite bullshit that I sadly heard so much of in this talk (discipline yourself, study more, turn off the phone, drink a laxative then don't shit your pants out of sheer will power, decide not to be sleepy, get over your heartbreak, just forget your traumas, etc.). If you have a better explanation for why we're in the state we're in (particularly also in the exacerbated states), then I am DYING to hear it (unironically and very genuinely).

[@yeezythabest]

You put into words what bothered me in this series. This channel is definitely drifting away from the rigor it once had and is getting closer and closer to neoliberal self-help bs.