FOR THE BROTHAS: AN INTRODUCTION

It must have been about 20 years ago when I first began thinking about creating a "Cultural Salon" as a reaction to the mundane social circles In Washington D.C. The richness of intellectual and artistic interchange had died, college friends had moved, the internet had not yet become the phenomenon it now is... I romanticised about the Salons of the mid to late 1800's in Paris, London and Berlin and the cultural dynamo of the Harlem Rennaisance. I was fortunate enough to meet a gentleman, an artist who lived and traveled with James Baldwin... Jimmy he affectionately called him, and he spoke often of their small cottage in southern France and of the many Artists, Poets and Luminaries that dropped in to chat and relax. Well, the impressionists, cubists, modernists, etc. all hung out together famously in those days and shared their ideas with one another creating a creative greenhouse in a world that was rapidly changing. I longed to have lived in those times, to have met Cassat, Rodin, Ellington, Fitzgerald, Baker, Balwin, well I did finally meet Baldwin and others purely for the joy of intellection upon the arts. This was in the late 1980's and by the mid 2000's I happened to run into a friend of mine from Hampton University who had been living in New York since he graduated in the early 90s. Well, I was surprised to hear him comment that in all of the wonder that is New York he never met anyone who ever really had anything interesting to say about art, literature, architecture, science, fashion or anything... I was so surprised to hear this since it had also been my experience. Well here I am in 2011 attempting the Virtual Salon...

Saturday, June 23, 2018

THE BETTER LESSON OF SOCIAL MEDIA IS A HUMAN JOURNEY TO REALITY


THE BETTER LESSON OF SOCIAL MEDIA


When I was a young collegian I was blessed with one of the most remarkable critics. I was in my first year of architectural studio and he was a seasoned, gifted architect and communicator who transformed the tedium of my freshman curriculum into a pleasurable and by virtue of this reminiscence, fondly-memorable experience. His secret was that he used vignettes of his marital trysts and trials as a metaphorical structure for comparative analysis softening the learning process with humor everyone could relate to. I wonder now how the banalities of married life and sex could have been compatible with building design and answering myself realize that life like architecture is all about solving problems. Whether his stories were real mattered less than their effectiveness as a teaching-tool… the moral being that people pay more attention to sex than anything else. Hence, we live in a culture that uses sex to convey most of its messages and as sexual entities we are none the worse for wear…

I am certain that were my old professor alive today he would not have the freedom to teach the way he did then. The intrusions and unjustified implications of a world driven by social media would crush the colorful personality of such a magnificent man… sign of the times I guess…

I was a late-comer to dating and ironically to the world of social media. Like my contemporaries I learned about the human dimension of socialization the old-fashioned way, by meeting face to face. In many ways my delayed romance with virtual reality equipped me with the ability to filter and thereby manage its innately intrusive and cryptic nature. For what it is worth I prefer the old way and like many others have discovered that both virtual and real socialization have similar dynamics. Social media has the ability to expand the ocean of possibilities and for captains of sound vessels this is wonderful news. I do not have to say that a word of caution is in order as in every situation for there are decidedly treacherous waters within the deeps and shallows of social media. It is my purpose to navigate the good waters and I believe that is the better part of social media… Like it or not men will set sail and enter this watery realm of strange and unexpected virtuality. Let us pray they will land on hospitable shores with their objectivity intact… and if prayer alone will not suffice let us employ elixirs and libations to celebrate all mankind redivivus.

Oftentimes a mans privacy is his virginity. Most men prefer keeping their private life private. Whether an instrument of control or a sanctimonious mirage it nonetheless speaks to an aspiration for virtuosity… Men are more secretive about their emotions more hesitant to explore anything intimate beyond pure and noncommittal pleasure. That being said I shall revise my statement to declare that social media has more metaphorical verisimilitude to a virtual acquaintance rather than a date and it most definitely does not approach the status of a virtual romance whatever that might be. I feel as-if a footnote should follow to explicate the suggestion poised by the last breath of the last sentence. To repeat the phase, “a virtual romance whatever that might be". My opinion of virtual dating definitely leans toward a cool subjectivity, biased in aura and decidedly suspicious. Of course, a virtual romance is precisely what it is... and there is no moral weight tipping it toward either the sacred or profane… nor any particularly neutral force balancing it in the middle. Wisely I have always imagined that I have maintained a safe-distance from the hypnotic virtuality of social media attributing my philosophical hermitage to the singular fact that fundamentally I am a realist.

Realists like me do not appreciate too much speculative uncertainty. We like to know and examine what we are dealing with the goal being to better understand our prospects for compatibility with our understanding of expected outcomes.

I might risk defining virtuality as a quality nearer to fantasy but only because virtuality possesses some of the magic of the unseen. Electricity was the great magic of the 19th and 20th century but today it is little more than a mis-understood service. How many that use it know how it works? I believe that the spirit upon which the internet phenomenon of the twentieth century owes itself was the brainchild of Tesla who first envisaged a virtual community (both local and cosmological) of energetic interconnectivity but in very in practical, tangible terms. Input, output, synthesis and all the glorious array of happily intermingling and attractive electrons, protons and neutrons sing his praises as an awakening force on the advent of human freedom. Cheers to Tesla who certainly would have marveled at social media for its fluid electro-magnificence! But we must also ask ourselves if he would have lugubriously sighed… well chaps there is only one fix for that so Bottums-UP!

It would be a short argument to debate the difference between virtual and real especially when it comes down to sex. Sex again? I guess it is unavoidable after all when discussing social media, so I shall chalk it up as a necessary and integral force of attraction mirroring life. How else should I hold my readers captive save with thinly-veiled, carefully placed allusions to sex? I  wonder that mundane documents such as legal papers, technical manuals and physics texts are not liberally inundated with nude, lude and lascivious pin-ups of all sexes and sexual persuasions to keep those heavy eyelids lifted.

Virtual sex can only really exist in the mind. It is a raw, conceptual bundle of possibility whilst real sex is both mental and physical. It is the bridge that separates physicality from imagination that cultivates the virtual landscape of social media preventing it from ever becoming real even though it may be experienced in real-time… the fantasy-value of social media lay in this technological anomaly. Social media in real time is truly the last human barrier to the time-space problem that caused Einstein to envisage his theory of relativity. Only when time and space can bend so that they can connect over vastitudes of existence will the fantasy of social media become reality. Now that is certainly a lid-lifter of a thought.

For the sake of intellectualism I will digress upon an Einsteinian towpath delving into the mystique of quantum physics whilst maintaining a firm grip on my glass of whiskey… (another version of the quintessential lid-lifter). In my minds-eye I have this opportunity to bedazzle my readers with a metaphysical presentation that is both sexy and heavy… if you would refresh your libation I feel as if this journey might be significantly more entertaining. So, lets immerse ourselves into the wet-world of quasi-reality contemplating a hypothetical phenomenon originally based only in the dry...

Two lovers who have been separated for seven month's kiss one another while video-chatting.  By this I mean that they begin to actually kiss the screens of their laptops so great is their longing for tactile gratification. The lovers live on different continents in real time but not in same-pace. If space, the physical element separating them could bend itself upon itself bringing them to the same place, in the same time by fusing their coordinates in time through time and space so they would be in the same physical place then they could taste each others lips and feel the heat, texture and pressure of each others embrace. The virtual-displacement of their experience of their existence, their location would be superseded bringing them together in a real-time event. It would be like throwing a crushed-paper ball from Washington, D.C. to Lagos, Nigeria in nanoseconds… Such a phenomena when it becomes possible will revolutionize the way people live and communicate on every level. For now it is just an intellectual vignette intended to titillate the imagination… much the same as sex… For the intellectual imaginative creativity is the virtual surrogate of sex.

Which is ultimately more gratifying, real or virtual sex? To answer that switch tracks to the mundane. Which is most gratifying real or virtual chocolate cake?

Is it necessary to delve into the myriad of pattern-similarities between phenomena originating in a virtual context expanding into the real by virtue of a fundamental human tendency to graduate from fantasizing virtual chocolate cake and setting out to experience a real slice?

While this theory would seem to explain the implosion of human civilisation in the twentieth century it merely matches identical scenarios sampled from every century, every era of human existence… it is one of those seemingly brilliant things which once uttered becomes vanquished by, (get a load of this image), a glamorous and husky-voiced socialite poised to slay the banter of o'er-cocktailed dilettantes. She, the femme fatale-virtual speaks in a richly calculated lilt as if talking through a mouthful of foire-gras whilst holding her billowing gold cigarette holder in the air saying in a heavy French accent,” Surely you don’t believe that nonsense dolling!” rolling her bejeweled head and neck back like a swan as she motions to the barman to fill her champagne glass held expectantly in the other hand…. as if it should have been refilled hours ago though she just swallowed the last drop…

Let us drink with her and toast to her brilliant and beguiling vituality.

At its best social media is a helpful tool possessing the innate ability to empower people on a global scale. At its worst social media mimics the most corrosive and puerile characteristics of its inventors… mankind…

In layman’s terms this means that social media can be a good date or a bad date… and from a realist's perspective the comparison pivots between a fond or unfortunate acquaintance...it’s only redeeming quality is also a haunting one rendering the phenomenon known as social media a mysteriously intangible phenomenon poised to follow and contradict human nature.  It is but really isn’t there, can you touch it or see it? It can appear or disappear in an instant, it is a totally blank canvas allowing us and everyone we think we know to become a masquerade.

This is precisely why I choose to remain grounded in the real world. The extent to which virtuality is pure fantasy is relative to context. At every turn each virtual party is forced to verify themselves against uncertain faiths. Now if you add faith and religiosity to our comparative analysis of social media and to the concept of a virtual landscape, acquaintance, date, lover, husband, wife, savior, etc. we find the possible suggestion of a virtual marriage. But a marriage to what? I suggest that social media forces a shotgun marriage to the unknown the un-verifiable. For many men this would trigger our desire for privacy and anonymity it would repel and attract us. The nonentity of social media would allow us to flirt, court, entice and consummate even to marry without any real ties, investments or consequences. The fantasy of social media appears to be a complete virtual package like a bag of chips but containing only air.

Another analogy might compare the virtual nature of social media to a popular video program where people, families and communities may be virtually manufactured only to be discarded at the end of the game. It is a uniquely modern mindset. The creativity and fragility of such a world view must demand that we carefully map our progress into the future of human social evolution…

Prior to the virtual age the nuclear age aroused mankind’s awareness of his proximity to disaster based on his misunderstanding of the nature of a divine cosmological creation. It is the idea that matters most. Evil is an unstoppable idea. The arrogance of men who play at virtual creation and decimation is way over my pay-grade… one hopes that with time mankind’s awareness of the power of the virtual will arm him with ability to replace ego with compassion. True to form, he will certainly rely on sex in order to sell the new brand of virtual humanitarianism.

Sex, marriage, consumerism and their antithesis anti-culture and anarchy all haunt the virtual landscape of social media and they are the cumulative mind-fucks of a world that is no longer grounded in reality. Social media is not evil, it is actually a marvelous invention. The iceberg of human culture we have built over the past 100,000 years far surpasses the novelty of mankind’s newest toy, social media. As such social media should be a mirror of healthy human culture inspiring men to aspire to new heights. Though I openly laugh at such optimism I also rejoice at its prospect. Life afer 56 years has taught me to shoot for the moon in order to reach the stars!

If social media were a citadel everyone would have a key or only some would have keys that worked. Who would have the working keys and how they would get them is purely a matter of consequence.

The first key to the proper use of social media is understanding and demonstrating respect for privacy and the second is demonstrating respect for human life and dignity. At the end of the day the better lesson of social media is that no matter how a man defines what is real or fantasy he can find a place where men can escape the harsh and banal circumstances of life to explore positive and fulfilling experiences from which they may bring back with them greater hopefulness for and confidence in tomorrow. This confidence is optimized by their ability to connect with other people in places meant to celebrate beauty of the human experience…

FIN


CHEERS!
Written By: BIGDADDY BLUES

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