Taking Nigel’s Side

Our group has always been very optimistic about our direction. Therefore when we were told our direction was repetitive we didn’t take it lightly. Then again, we thought, there seems to be a vital point placed in front of us. Ok, so we initially wanted to explore the idea of the second life. All the imperfections of virtual communities, its isolation from the physical world, the Big Brother like monitoring and its theft and mix-match of identity that all resulted in what we may like to call today the ultimate consumer society, nothing is for real today, no matter what you think you’re selling. Was this second life a therapy for some to overcome their timid personalities where online they would be their ideal self in their funny version of a utopian world or was it an illness, further infecting us and the ones around us with the disease of pretending? It is a second life after all, presuming you have a first. Why you would choose to have a second life is beyond me, its hard enough dealing with the first one. Anyway what we realised, as a group, is that Nigel, our Multimedia lecturer, had a point. Wasn’t it tiresome to always look at the negative, to moan and moan and then perhaps end up excluding yourself from the upcoming, ever-changing, new and old within days, advanced and powerfully technological society that is, without hesitation, becoming our norm? “Yes” we said.. haha. What do we now do then? (I don’t particularly mean as women who may have nothing left to do if not moan) This isn’t a quote from Nigel but he might have well sung 'look on the brighter side of life'. So we trashed the second life as it made our heart race with anger and looked at what benefits come out of the internet. Now we’re looking at the virtual communities that deal with online schooling, promoting yourself and exactly what I’m doing here, blogging or in particular the more advanced blogging, citizen journalism.
In my opinion it’s a good move, if for just a simple reason that we’re one of the only groups that smile in lesson. Then again what is beautiful without pain? What I mean is that maybe, just maybe 100000 years from now our world will be at the tips of our fingers. I guess that would be normal then and people would always wonder how we were ever bothered to actually put on uniform and come into class, run around promoting ourselves and walk up to a group of strangers and present ourselves. Will technology take away the beauty of life? That’s what I thought if it were used excessively like it is going to be tomorrow but then again…beauty, happiness. What are the meanings of these words today to you and I? Today they may be having a drink with a friend, playing golf, watching the sunset, hearing laughter from a child and the smell of freshly baked bread. Tomorrow they will be something else and the day after they will be another. The word ‘happiness’ will change everyday therefore I could comfortably say, ‘I have a Facebook account and yes I know I’m being observed by different companies.’ Why? In reference to my blog post ‘I’m being used by this capitalist society!’, I ranted on about how I somehow feel used and abused to be observed to such a high degree. I’m still being observed but I can look at it in two ways. For instance, my Facebook profile lists all my preferred films and music genres and because I have made this public I’m frequently being offered tickets to see various exhibitions and music bands – to spend more money than I usually would prefer to, and lately because these advertisements are in reference to me I’m starting to regard them as some kind of friend or even ‘a’ friend; a friend who does the research on upcoming gigs for me. After all, Karl Marx did explain that the finishing point in the arts, music, film etc, cannot occur without its ‘last finish’ which is consumption. One may start to argue here that the arts is no longer an art but all about the ‘last finish’, nevertheless if we want/need more of the arts we have to consume it. We must acknowledge and accept that we (we as men, women and children of all classes and ethnicities) are patrons who are the driving force behind production, who are part of today’s production and an inspiration to tomorrow’s production. In all honesty, if by consuming I managed to be part of a ‘backstage inspiration’ to the next Salvador Dali then I’m in. By consuming these products I’m learning more about my preferred subjects/topics, similarly to the way Amazon.com send me emails almost titled ‘Thought you might like this pal’, Facebook is posting their collective ideas on my taste of music and literature.


Anyway realising I had a new friend (not particularly Facebook as a whole but perhaps its advertisements. If only we could do that in reality, befriend only a certain percentage of someone) I decided to take advantage of him (yes him, because I said so. No I’m kidding, because of Mark Zuckerberg’s sex) by adding the Visual Bookshelf application to my profile. I started off with around 70 books I had already read and only 2 months later have resulted with a total of 91 books already read and six I’d like to read. Only two months later I had made a decision that I always found so irritating to be clear on. What book to read next? The Visual Bookshelf application not only let me share with others what books I’d read but let others comment and suggest related books I may be interested in – So I went and bought them (I hate giving back a book I’ve read. Come to think of it that’s quite narcissistic of me). With the help of the advertisements and many other profile visitors I had read these books briskly (the image is somewhat hilarious I know – visualising the way superman read books) for the reason that they were interesting and also, more crucially, because I knew there was more. There were more books to read, books that I was being introduced to everyday (with an occasional £3.99 mug that read ‘Virginia Woolf and Sting rock!’).

Ok, so another way I could be looking at this would be by my initial reaction to Facebook’s generous offerings (angered by the somewhat forceful assumptions of my interests). If truth be told, although I have befriended the advertisements, like true friends we still have virtual arguments, a simple ‘I don’t think so’ is the usual comeback though. Yet we, as friends, have come to an agreement that everything has a limit. In advertising the extreme is the preferred, putting out the most (in quantity) so that they can grab your attention, yet as an individual (assuming that advertisements place me in categories and my personal morals create limitations to the assumed categories I’m placed in) I can learn, through the experience of consuming the product, what my limitations are so that I may not digress into extreme popular culture.
So there it is, my relationship with Facebook is (at this stage) at sound. A bit of me and a bit of them is what makes me happy.