Evacuating the Public of Substance From MTV to Facebook

I can well remember warnings from media critics at the time MTV emerged on the scene that it represented a new stage in the ongoing suffusion of the public with the debased norms and forms of marketing and promotional discourse, a new chapter in the hegemony of fetishized commodities, the Culture Industry, Barthean bourgeois Mythology, the Debordian Spectacle, you name it:

With MTV the already troubled and porous distinction between broadcast entertainment and the ad content that paid for it broke down altogether, the music videos promoting pop stars and their latest product available for sale was the actual entertainment offered up between commercials -- commercials "breaking" for nothing but more commercials...

Needless to say, Americans swallowed this sweet sinister pill right down, eagerly and effortlessly, and it isn't so much that the media critics were wrong in their concerns as mostly right but, in the words of a tune on high rotation in the early days of MTV: "It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine."

Although we can expect comparable indifference in the face of subsequent evacuations of substance and legitimacy for the public on which we do finally depend for equal recourse to law, for nonviolent adjudication of disputes, for reliable knowledge of a difficult world, I may as well note that facebook and other forms of so-called social media actually take up the MTV-model and go it one better.

With MTV we are seduced into continuous consumers of marketing and promotional content through the citation of a distinction between advertising and entertainment that no longer functions as anything more than an empty formalism, a difference that makes no real difference -- but with facebook we are not merely continuous consumers of marketing-and promotion-qua-infotainment, but the producers ourselves of the marketing and promotional content we consume.

In social networking formations we are seduced into being entertained precisely by the offering up of self-promotional profiles, self-advertising often consisting of little more than spectacles of "befriending" consumer goods and lifestyle signifiers, and of participating in self-organized marketing sampling and the creation of crowdsourced ad copy through surveys, recommendations, testimonials, and reviews.

We are taking one more step into the reduction of all culture to advertising copy, all society to marketing research.

And stressed, insecure, depressed, confused, it's the end of the world as we know it, and yet we declare, right up to the sheer cliff face... "and I feel fine."