An excerpt from a great article on social media and its effects on our culture: How many times have we witnessed this on comment sections on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? Debate about cultural topics, in our era of insta-judgment and unwarranted conclusions, becomes so flattened and foreshortened that the initial subject disappears from view. Anyone who’s ever read anything I have written understands that I am deeply committed to a view of culture as politics (and politics as an aspect of culture). But the back-and-forth social-media wars over (insert subject) demonstrate how cultural works get reduced to “politics” in the least interesting sense of that word, meaning the tedious binary between “left” and “right,” neither word meaning what it claims to mean, that explains nothing and obscures everything. An entire range of complex divisions and intersections in American life — based in geography, history, race, class, education and economics, in other words all the elements of “culture” in its anthropological sense — get boiled down to the symbolic circus of bipartisan politics. (I am always tempted to say “meaningless” circus, but that gets people’s dander up and isn’t quite true. It means. It just doesn’t mean much.)
Posted on: Thu, 22 Jan 2015 13:18:11 +0000