Rant

You'll excuse the sore rant here, but it's sometimes frustrating to witness the venal nature of today's rabid media. We're doing this to ourselves daily, mindlessly, often subtle, unnoticed. American culture is casually and effectively diminishing our humanity, while elevating social platforms to a living status, a new and crazy species.

We're doing this with simple words, common phrases and associations, language that magically breathes life into entities like X-Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. They are all actually living, feeling beings now that must be fed, nurtured, constantly monitored. 

"Social media melted down as..."

"Twitter exploded today after..."

"Facebook reacted harshly when..."

We talk and pretend as if these soulless electronic platforms have substance and identity, some new consciousness. In reality, these public forums are the most disparate, random, and therefore unreliable mess of human expression, all at the same or similar town square, at the same time, same inane shouting volume.

They easily dominate our attention. We interact with these entities hourly, and eagerly seek out their opinion on all things new, faddish, quizzing it all. For an ailing, aging culture increasingly lonely, veering hard off-course, a rudderless people mostly unsatisfied, yearning for some meaning beyond the 9-5, beyond birth-consumption-death.

Now a crudely descended culture that has never been this secular, this debt-ridden, this profane, this disallusioned in spirit. These quixotic social meeting places are not our new best friends. Are we using these platforms to hide from ourselves, thereby rendering our humanity to an anonymous corner of our personal experience? Feels like it.