Super Update Me

Are You Getting Your Fill at the Social Networking Buffet?

How organized do you have to be to use all these social networking tools?

Twitter, Facebook and Myspace status updates seem like a hassle to me. Especially if you let yourself and your narcissistic web of friends ossify into a dysfunctional reaction chain whereby everyone in your life needs to know what you’re doing, where you’re going, who you’re with. 

No one cares if you’re on your way to Walmart to buy socks. If you can Twitter your way out of prison, well great. The same concept behind Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me! could be put to work to examine what is at stake in these so-called social networking tools.

After 30 days of attempting to catalog your every move from the daily ‘im wakin up’ to the even-more-mundane ‘goin p’ I think that a more apt name would surface: Social Corralling tool. 

Of course, few of us do this. Nobody eats McDonalds three times a day, every day. But some insist on letting THE INTERNETZ know:

a) they're out

b) ‘bikin 2 get a Starbuck’ 

c) and ‘call me on my cell’ ← USELESS  

RE: C)

"oh yeah, Ed McMahon and the Prize Patrol were going to swing by your apartment, but you had text-posted to Twitter saying you were 'waitin in line @ Sonograms R Us' or "Well their Facebook status for the night of the murder is a sound alibi: there they were at the book store reading up on how to make their wardrobe more Steam Punk."

All I am saying is that if I had the funds, I would be making a documentary where I showcase myself posting status updates every time I do anything, with the exception of homeostasis...but if that's all I was doing for an extended period of time (like for more than 45 minutes) my post would say: 'still breathin, y'all.'

Hiatus

Not that anyone reads this, but I was away for a week at a family reunion in the considerably-less-sunny (than Southern California) Florida Panhandle where my immediate family resides.

While there I was afforded the opportunity to ruminate on the film Hancock that I saw the day before my departure. It struck me while drinking Nicaraguan rum in a park with my good friend that the arc of Will Smith's character follows a trail blazed by the post-pubescent antics of child stars like the 'the Two Coreys', Lindsay Lohan, to a lesser extent Paris Hilton and etc. 

There are a few moments that situate Hancock as a celebrity: 

1) Widely popular YouTube clips that document his various feats of superhuman strength

- there is a threshold for YouTube hits after which one is deemed a demi-celeb.

2) Regular coverage of his antics on the nightly news

- surely reminiscent of the celeb-journalism that occurs on the CNNs and FOX News channels. Not to mention TMZ.com's tv show and Entertainment Tonight. 

3) The 'aha' moment for me was perhaps the massive audience that turns out to witness Hancock turn himself over to prison authorities, vowing to stay in prison and serve his time. And the content of the speech he gives as he surrenders. He says (paraphrasing): "I know I have been somewhat of a burden on the city. It's difficult for me, considering I am the only one of my kind."

His argument places the blame for his actions on his exalted state. It's not his fault, it's because he's usually wasted because he can't cope with being a superhuman. And so to atone, he is going to put himself through rehab: an institution that has taken on a life of its own over the past 2-3 years. Michael Richards uses racial slurs: rehab fixed that. And Celebrity Rehab, the VH1 ratings powerhouse shows everyone how spilling one's guts for ten whole episodes can win one the graces once revoked by friends and family. 

Of course, Smith's Hancock learns his lessons much earlier and to much more benefit than the run-of-the-mill child star/has been whose lesson only ever comes too late in their career for it to result in a symbiotic relationship between them and their fans/friends/family. Hancock realizes the error of his miscreant ways and attempts to realign himself with the police and to weave gracefully back into the social fabric are successful enough for him to obtain hero status.

...not that that's what the movie is all about. It's not as bad as the reviews make it sound. 

MySpace: The Post 9/11 40-Acres-and-a-Mule

"In Cyberspace all positive properties are externalized in the sense that everything you are in a positive sense, all your features can be manipulated. When one plays in virtual space I can for example be a homosexual man who pretends to be a heterosexual woman, or whatever: either I can build a new identity for myself or in a more paranoiac way, I am somehow already controlled, manipulated by the digital space." - from the 'About Me' section of the MySpace of Slavoj Zizek

It is in the spirit of this (supposed) Zizek quote that I consider the MySpace headline as the post-9/11 epitaph: It is both an introduction to a 'hyper-You' and an epitaph for your analog-Self.

To further explain what I am saying (and to provide some much needed entertainment in this so-far dry post), here is yet more Zizek. Pay attention to what he says here about the Matrix the computer component in The Matrix) as a generator of fictions:

Thus the myspace headline becomes a declaration of your hyper-you: the digital layer in the palimpsest of the system of fictions that constitute the reality of your being.

Advocate For Me: Celebrities in Translation

Little Richard is the best example of why celebrities are needed in the day to day communication process. It's the emphasis that he adds to the (what's her name?) 'Real Customer' experience: an emphasis that would look and sound absurd coming from...well, anyone who is not a celebrity.

I would really like to see the Hamburglar get in on that action. I imagine a single mother at a McDonalds with kids playing in a ball pit behind her. As she recounts how five-year-old Jackie lost her daddy, the jail-striped and be-caped Hamburglar sits with the mom at one of those metal picnic tables, shaking his head and doling out a mournful "rubble-rubble" or two--all with that big-cheeked, uni-toothed smile:


Why do Geico's commercials work? Is it the ultra-irony waves radiating from the likes of Charo and Michael Winslow with their has-been status? It's nice to see that the guy from Police Academy is still a human soundboard. But the question I ask myself is how does a celebrity help me understand the plight of my neighbor. Better still is the commentary of the celeb-obsessed train of thought Pop is focused on: If it doesn't involve celebrities, then it matters a little less.

Doesn't the commercial subtly spoof the work celebrities like Angelina Jolie, Oprah, Jay-Z, Sean Penn and Bono are doing as publicists for the plight of the world's less fortunate? It does.

"I need a celebrity advocate for my bourgeois struggle to overcome the inconveniences of automobile ownership! Thanks, Little Richard."