Facebook and the media: making America safe for mediocrity
February 15, 2007
A few days ago, I was skimming through the news section of the Daily Illini. On this particular occasion, a quote pulled from a story on the fifth page caught my eye. Under an Associated Press story with the headline “Comcast, Facebook to launch TV series,” I saw the words of television producer R.J. Cutler: “Everyone has a story to tell. Their stories are compelling and engaging and dramatic and powerful and worthy of telling.”
I read the story. The television series, called “Facebook Diaries,” will consist of 10 half-hour episodes with user-generated videos and will appear online and through video on demand.
I immediately reached the glaringly obvious conclusion that Facebook is ruining America.
Not single-handedly, mind you. Facebook may well be the second most popular social networking site behind MySpace and the seventh most trafficked site on the Internet, but even it can’t topple the good ol’ US of A all by itself.
It can, however, team up with television networks and the massive media conglomerates that own them, and that’s when we’ve got a real fight on our hands.
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It’s not just that advertisers are drooling over all the different ways to manipulate the massive and highly sought after 18 to 24-year-old demographic who use Facebook. Sure, a Facebook executive said the series will provide a host of “sponsorship and advertising opportunities.” But after all, that’s just the free market at work.
It’s not just that Comcast and Facebook chose Cutler, who is the producer of “edgy” work such as Fox’s “Black. White.,” which uses advanced makeup techniques to turn a white family black and a black family white, puts the two families in a house together, and leaves its audience to sit back and watch the sparks fly. After all, Cutler is highly respected for his “daring” confrontation of important social issues.
No, the manipulation and exploitation of the human race has existed for several millennia. My problem isn’t Adam Smith’s invisible hand or R.J. Cutler’s roving cameras.
My problem is the dumbing down of the American populace and this patently absurd notion that “everyone has a story to tell,” each one “worthy of telling.” This myth has been propagated for far too long, and we must all be disabused of it.
It’s no great surprise that as a tool of the common student, Facebook has played its own small part in a larger trend in our society: the elevation and exaltation of the common man. It’s a trend we see in reality television, on YouTube, in the blogosphere, in populist cable news hosts, in a politics driven by focus groups and polls and in our “plainspoken” President.
Some of the things in that list are better than others, but they’re all a part of the effort to wrest power from the grips of the “elite.” That’s not necessarily such a bad thing. Elevating the common man is a good thing, but only if it is humanity that is being elevated and not just the quality of commonness.
I fear that’s not what’s happening. I see FDR replaced by Bush, Cronkite by Couric, Pryor by Mencia, “Citizen Kane” by “Crash.” And it makes me realize that being a member of the elite isn’t such a bad thing after all.
Why, then, do we consider it interesting television to watch Facebook users tell their stories?
The inevitable pitch will be that these are stories about students just like us. But isn’t it about time we ask ourselves why we would spend our time listening to people just like us? People like us are ordinary, boring and thoroughly unworthy of the attention of millions of viewers.
Let us instead, with humility in our hearts and a burning drive to educate and improve ourselves, turn to those who are better than us, those with expertise and to those with something unique to offer mankind.
Perhaps that way we will become closer to them, rather than continue the current pattern of merely replacing them with us.
