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for what it's worth, i tend to relativize this dimension of the planet blog---i think there are alot of people who are and have been offended and angered by what has come of the blur of tabloid and information, gossip and facts about the world (whatever a fact really is), the substitution of personality construction for comprehensive analysis, the evacuation of the space for system critique and its replacement with a fatuous cycling of surface infotainment in the context of which the system-level remains always necessarily legitimate no matter what happens and all possibility of critique gets collapsed onto defects of an individual personality--a ghost-personality no less, product of the circulation of factoids itself. it has beena smothering descent into trivia, as if the Interests of Commerce-uber-alles has forced us from being able to stand in front of the clothes dryer to being stuffed face-first into the lint screen.
because consumers have NO power, because consumers are nice little creatures who desire what they are told they desire within the ranges that they are told they want, so they can "express themselves" by acquiring a "personalized" sequence of otherwise identical commodities, consumers of infotainment have been subjected to this, and have subjected themselves to it. at the level of framing memes, consumers are told that markets are necessarily rational and with that the descent into a blizzard of trivial is presented as the march forward of "progress"---a favorite bourgeois conceit.
i think people are pissed off by this, fed up by it, but being nice adaptable creatures who view the world from a chair in their living room (70% of americans imagine television as a primary "information source") they have no choice but to adapt to it, in this the freeest of all possible situations (except where it isn't) in this the best of all possible worlds (which is a shabby, ugly, idiotic sham)...so they act out. the planet blog seems to me in significant measure a theater for acting-out.
and everyone knows that the primary drivers behind this descent into trivia have been politically conservative--the symbol of rupert murdoch functions as a convenience here---and everyone knows that it has been the conservative media apparatus that has pioneered the routinization of yellow journalism passed off as information in the television context. and everyone knows that there is a convergence between that and the world as presented in advertisements, as a world of commodity-desires. and if you think about it, i imagine it self-evident that this shitty state of affairs is a very good expression of capitalism in all its slick superficiality and brutal self-referentiality.
so you either repeat the mechanisms and turn them back on the conservatives when the opportunity presents itself--in which case there is gratification but a net less in that you de facto participate in legitimating the order itself when you play the game as the order has come to play it across the one-dimensional flashing theater of television---or you criticize the order itself, in which case you are excluded from access to the one-dimensional theater of the bourgeois world and it's logic.
but all this is normal, comrades, like the weather, like neoliberalism.
every once in a while, i remember that lars von trier was right in "dogville" about the american system.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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