One morning I was drinking coffee in McDonalds and reading/writing while, courtesy of McDonalds, I involuntarily listened to Nicole, Ryan, etc on the Sirius Satellite radio ‘Morning Mashup’.
The aim of all their talk, as far as I could tell, seemed to be just to keep talking, with the ultimate goal being those raucous moments when they were all talking loudly at once.
The chief subject, if you can say there was such a thing, seemed to be a string of discussions about – ‘What did this celebrity do yesterday? What did that one say?, Where were they seen? Who were they with?,’ etc.
I wondered again about all this.
Why are celebrities at the core of the discussion? Well, maybe they’re just the tip of a human iceberg of craving to be noticed. The iceberg itself contains all people, or almost all, each one of them – as they take their selfies, tweet, tweet tweet, text, text text, and talk, talk, talk – trying to be a celebrity too.
Meanwhile, of course, high school students are being shot down in schools, enraged drivers are mowing people down in the streets, destitute refugees are crowding roads, species are increasingly being driven extinct and forests are shrinking all over the world.
Yes, talking and putting on a show is what matters now.
When Marshall McLuhan declared in the 1960s that the “Medium is the Message”, everyone seemed to be mesmerized by the idea, and I think they’re still mesmerized. I was one of the few who were sceptical. Just because people no longer cared about the messages anymore, didn’t mean the messages were no longer important.
Just because most people now no longer care about history – don’t want any part of the past and don’t want to think about the future – doesn’t mean the past is no longer important, or that the future is no longer coming.
Alan Conrad 