My Cultural Anthropology professor abandoned the syllabus a few times and, instead, gave us very intriguing hour-long soliloquies about “evil anthropologists” (occasionally punctuating the speeches by warning me against becoming one lol).
It was before Facebook existed, in fact before MySpace, too, AOL chat was dying out to Yahoo chat and sociologists had barely begun looking at their social impact at all in any serious way.
In the roots of mass social manipulation were (and, so far, remain) the parts of society conceived of by these “evil anthropologists”, the “cool-setters” or “trend-setters” as he liked to call them sometimes, “assholes” as he’d call them other times.
These are the people that, for instance, gave us the Nike swoosh. An almost accidental-looking visual brand that, using rudimentary mass-social tools like non-interactive TV, had achieved a historical god-like status which granted it adoration when put beside identical, or even superior quality, items not so-branded. And on the authority of this programmed artificial devotion, Nike sweatshops were born and continue to operate to this day.
The evil anthropologists, essentially, were those C. Anthropologists that had abandoned their objectivity and violated the most basic tenet of the field of non-interventionism and pure observation. They had, in fact, become Sociologists which, in his mind, were nothing more than Peeping-Tom-Cultural-Anthropologists – mass manipulators by any other name,
k guilty on the long-ago charge of becoming an evil cultural anthropolgist; I have totally used the once-in-a lifetime opportunity of social media’s inception and roll-out to not just study but to tinker with not just my own culture, but every culture out there that’s connected via these networks, but I’ve only tinkered and I like to think in a positive way which forces people to think against the grain of their own beliefs and/or social programming.
Which is why I very firmly defy the branding of Facebook et al as “social networking”. And defy the branding of our age as “the information age”.
Because I’ve looked with a sociologically manipulative eye at the way each function, and conclude that they should be labeled “Anti-social media” and “the disinformation age”, respectively.
And that’s not born of cynicism; it’s an objective conclusion. I might quite seriously write a book on it sometime soon.
Everyone has an almost instinctive knowledge of Facebook’s deleterious effect on individuals and groups alike, but very few take it seriously so even knowing better they suspend their intellectualism and allow it to affect them anyway.
In this way…
We have concentrated the knee-jerk color code voting that was already endemic, while social momentum (ironically, and against design) is beginning to drive in directions contrary to the electoral polls.
Cognitive dissonance makes the internet-world go ’round.
Firefly Uprising 