Social media has become the phenomenon of our times,
Overwhelming the telephone, the letter, the face to face conversation.
Remember the face to face conversation?
The sense of life in the face sitting opposite,
The changing expressions, the sound of the voice,
The wink, the nod, the smile, the laugh, the outstretched hand?
They have all gone the way of the telegraph,
The telegram, the social call, the soiree,
The heart to heart talk, the business luncheon,
The door to door salesman.
It's all imogees, memes and instant messaging now.
Instant messaging, friend requests and tweets
Crowd each other out for space
Across the platforms of the social media landscape.
Fake news, blogs, exaggerated claims,
Rants and rumors, clips of facts
Taken out of context,
Celebrity endorsements, selfies, likes,
Comments on top of comments on top of comments
Tagged to all sorts of attention grabbing video clips:
People taking off their clothes,
Setting themselves on fire,
Drinking laundry detergent,
Jumping out buildings
Phishing schemes, email bombs, pop up ads
While all the while,
Somewhere in the background,
A hidden software program
Secretly compiles our profiles
And sells them to telemarketers.
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Author Notes
This is a prose poem very much in the style of Jack Anderson's Transcendence of the Pencil or Commanding a Telephone to Ring, for anyone familiar with his work. This is a very different way of creating a music in language, in this case a mechanical kind of language drawn from the background noise of our automated, mechanized world. There is something dehumanizing to it for me, something sinister, lurking under the pop up ads, watching us and compiling us and selling us. And something dehumanizing in hollowing out the experience of contact, removing the physical and replacing it with these representations. estory
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