A Negative Breaking Point on Youtube

The other night, I discovered a new and enormously popular viral video in which an irate father exacts revenge for a Facebook post made by his teenage daughter. Naturally, it's of interest to me, because it depicts somebody hitting a breaking point and embracing it completely. It just so happens that I don’t approve in this case.

More than by anything in the video itself, I am struck by the enormous string of comments beneath it. While I have a pretty strongly adverse reaction to the video, my discomfort with the cheerleading in the comments is mitigated slightly by the awareness that it indicates that people widely see the appeal of breaking points and are genuinely desirous of them. There’s something positive in that; the trouble is simply that people may not realize that the satisfying feeling of watching somebody follow through on something like this doesn’t always mean that it’s good.

It’s shocking to me how unquestioning people are in the face of their own gleeful reactions to cool acts of vengeance witnessed at a safe distance. Comments siding against the unseen teenage girl dominate the comments on the video by a factor of something like thirty to one. That almost suggests a bullying mentality on the part of the crowd, and certainly it indicates a penchant for knee-jerk reactions. The daughter isn’t in this video to defend herself and we don’t know what her home life is. To my mind, it’s always good practice to give the benefit of the doubt to the one who is absent.

Even if the situation is exactly as it’s presented in this video, she’s just a teenage girl expressing her frustrations. Her frustrations may well be unfounded, but there’s a role for direct communication in setting her straight. This petty vengeance on the father’s part is just passive-aggressive, and it’s spectacularly passive-aggressive, as he seemingly goes out of his way to avoid addressing her directly (she’s not likely to see the video, after all) while still demonstrating serious aggression by discharging a fucking firearm.

Fostering a breaking point is only worthwhile if what arises from the destruction is significantly better than what was left behind. I don’t really see that happening in this case. In my experience, this sort of thing fosters resentment more than anything else. Wanton destruction coupled with virulent browbeating and public humiliation is pretty likely to drive a deeper wedge between parent and child, and the gap will widen still more as this man’s daughter acts out in more serious ways, generating still more outbursts from dad.

I’m rather sorry that people like this so much. It’s sad that people are so eager to watch a man snap and to live vicariously through it, while more nuanced, social, political, or cultural notions of breaking points evidently remain inaccessible to the masses. There is a role for bald aggression sometimes, but that role is not in parenting. Parenting should entail far more patience than this. The various commenters don’t seem to recognize that patience does not translate to acceptance or capitulation.

The point of patience in this is only that while the world provides us numerous just targets for cathartic vengeance, our children are not among them. There is no place for vengeance or pettiness in parenting. Those are things we should withhold from our children in the interest of seeing that they never misuse them either.

Killing Not Just Newspapers, But News

Nielsen released its report yesterday on how Americans spend their time online, and most of the extensive media coverage seems to be focusing on how popular their research shows Facebook to be. Apparently there was some doubt about that prior to yesterday. This study tells a much larger story than that, however. Focusing on the social media aspect of it seems like a strange bit of rhetoric, and an impulse to exploit the angle that news outlets assume will generate the most attention. Social media and blogs together comprised almost a quarter of people’s time spent online, but it was not the largest category. That remains the miscellaneous category, but let’s not pull punches here, it’s porn. The smallest share of time online goes to news, at 2.6 percent.

That’s a significant piece of information at a time when the internet is said to be killing newspapers, with even television media having a difficult time keeping up with changing landscape. But if society as a whole is devoting only one fortieth of its time spent online to learning about current events, I wonder if that calls into question the assumption that traditional news media are failing because of competition from convenient, cheap, high volume online sources of news. Other analyses have indicated that overall readership of established news agencies is in decline, not just readership of their print formats. It seems that it has always been assumed that this readership was dispersing to other sources from which they gathered the same volume of information that they used to consume, but I expect that that would be difficult to prove empirically. To me, these new numbers support an alternative interpretation: that people are opting out of information-gathering altogether, and that established news media are losing ground not to competition, but to distraction.

The existing narrative reflects what I think is an unfortunate and all too common perspective that all change is positive change. Letting that perspective go unquestioned allows us to sacrifice the best of what is currently available to us, either because the best of what is emerging is thought to outweigh it or because preserving anything against the onslaught of social or technological change is deemed a lost cause. The optimistic outlook on current trends in news consumption is evidently that there is a greater volume of reporting, a greater diversity of opinion, and a greater ease of access. That’s hardly all there is to the story, though. A greater volume of reporting doesn’t mean much if the sources of that reporting are devoid of the resources that might otherwise encourage a fuller investigation and a higher quality of reporting. A greater diversity of opinion is hardly progress if it reflects a devaluing of objectivity and a tendency of people to choose the sources of their news based on a preexisting agreement with the outlet’s perspective. Greater ease of access is barely significant if fewer people are choosing to access the most significant information that is available to them.

Of course, I don’t know that any of these trends are truly dominant. I am confident, however, that there is far too much optimistic assumption about the character of American audiences, and far too much dismissiveness and acceptance of powerlessness among those who might be in a position to affect positive change in consumer behavior. Much of the media seems content to fawn over social networking sites, curve their reporting on topics of much broader significance around a sense of awe at their popularity, wrongly declare them to be the drivers of foreign revolutions, and so on. The cultural position of Facebook, Twitter and the like is crucially important, but I would love to see a lot more analysis of its causes and effects, and a basic willingness to criticize and resist.

As far as I’m concerned, the story to be taken away from the Nielsen report is not that Facebook holds irreversible cultural dominance, but that an enormous portion of the American public enjoys masturbation in its multitudinous forms, and hates information and critical thinking. And as much as that drives frivolous use of social media and a resistance to hard news, it also may inform the existing news media’s response to such trends, so that their diminished quality and misplaced emphasis drives nails into their own coffins.

Socializing Online Without Wanting To

In last week’s New Yorker, there was an article about online dating, exploring its origins, its multiple iterations, and its widespread relevance in the modern world. The author, Nick Paumgarten, points out that “For many people in their twenties, accustomed to conducting much of their social life online, it is no less natural a way to hook up than the church social or the night-club-bathroom line.” This is certainly true to my experience. I see nothing unusual, shameful, or frightening about meeting a person through online communication, and I can perceive some definite advantages to online dating. But at the same time, I despise an excessive reliance on the internet for social exploration and interaction. I do not have a Facebook or Twitter account, and I steadfastly refuse to get drawn into any such trend, even though it is increasingly clear that the virtual ubiquity of these sites threatens to put me at a distinct disadvantage in some contexts.

Not that any external factors are necessary to put me at such a disadvantage. I’m just no damn good at meeting, interacting with, and relating to most other people. That may seem like the sort of characteristic that ought to push a person straight towards social networking technology, but I think that my resistance to it and my own social impediments are both grounded in similar aspects of my personality. I have high standards for my personal relationships and for the sort of people I interact with. I do not seek out casual acquaintanceships, and the fact that I desire a strong element of earnestness and commitment in even the most basic friendships evidently makes me intimidating at the outset of any social interaction. It probably goes a long way towards explaining why people who are purportedly very fond of me and very interested in me never seem to call me on the telephone, even when they themselves bring up the subject of further contact. I think I appear inaccessible, and that that makes people uncertain of how to reach out to me and secure my interest when we are not meeting in passing. And when we are not, the difficulty is that one or both of us must put forth some serious effort at making a connection. Not so with online communication or text messaging.

Callback

There was an article posted to Cracked.com yesterday, that I think is important reading. Naturally, I would think that, because it recalls a post I made to this blog in February. The Cracked author, Mark Hill, however, puts me to shame in that his piece, in that site's fashion, makes a very systematic presentation of his points, drawing on extensive research.

But regardless of exactly how the topic is presented, it is good just to see anyone questioning the asinine media narrative about the socially transformative power of new media. It is good to see anyone making an effort to take Twitter, Facebook, and Western egos down a notch or two. It is disheartening when I can go many weeks without seeing anyone take a rational view on subjects like this, and so it is downright inspiring when someone finally does. There is a conflict present here between a logical assessment of surrounding circumstances and self-aggrandizing, delusional optimism about our own effectiveness in global developments. And of course, eschewing reason in favor of the comforting belief that our mundane activities are inspiring populations and toppling governments only serves to retard our motivation to do more, to put activity behind our activism, and to do a bit of self-sacrifice for the good of others. Why bother if your conspicuous consumption of technology is doing the work for you? Well it isn't, as I pointed out in February, and as The New Yorker pointed out before that, and as Mark Hill very astutely pointed out yesterday.

Will more rational people contribute to this discussion in time? I am earnestly hopeful that prominent writers and commentators will work to tear down this foolhardy conviction that our impersonal, overly casual social activities are good enough to start revolutions. Raising questions about that assumption in the minds of the broader population could constitute a crucial breaking point. We need desperately to break in favor of a clearer understanding of what gives real value to human activity. As it is, this absurd, poorly thought out narrative is making us lazy and self-righteous, and that is a truly poisonous combination.