Category: Social Media

A Modern Drug for Contemporary Life

I love drug commercials on TV — not those idiot Cialis/Viagra jobbers; they’re way too nudge, nudge/wink,wink for my tastes — the real ones.  The ones that put the fear of God into you, then casually mention that they might have a cure, if you happen to be interested.  I see them as a 45 second history on our times.

Just to review.  The drug commercials usually start with an ordinary middle-class/middle-aged scene.  Somebody, sometimes in black and white, isn’t feeling well.  The kindly voice-over explains that this ailment, however small, is nothing to fool with.  It could be a disastrous medical condition.  Unfortunately, only trained professionals can tell the difference.  Therefore, it would be best, just for a little peace of mind, to get your sorry ass to the doctor – NOW – or you’re going to die – horribly, miserably and alone.  They usually don’t gear it up that bad, but the message is clear: there’s a tombstone out there somewhere.  At this point, the drug name is introduced as the only known cure for the disease you don’t have.  It’s repeated a couple of times, with its pedigree or references, as the middle-class/middle-aged scene changes to carefree (in colour) recreation, usually swimming or golf.  (BTW, all prescription drugs are government approved.)  After that, it’s all about, don’t take our word for it “Ask your doctor if Brand X is right for you.”  This naturally assumes that we somehow caught the disease, condition or ailment during the first half of the commercial, and now it’s only a matter of treatment.  Then — and this is the best part — the voice-over goes absolutely monotone and says something like, “Brand X is not right for everyone.  Serious side effects may include excruciating muscle pain, instantaneous diarrhea and incurable eyeball disease.  Talk to your doctor immediately if your tongue falls out.  Do not take Brand X if you’re a woman who’s ever even seen someone who’s pregnant or a man with a healthy liver and kidneys.”  The middle-class/middle-aged scene then changes to sunset or candlelit dining, with the drug name written in bold across the screen.  Fade out and back to reruns of Everybody Loves Friends.  There are a number of variations, but, in general, that’s it.

The reason I love these commercials so much is they really are an unconscious historical record of contemporary life.  For the last two generations (and maybe three) we have been giving ourselves every social, political, spiritual, economic, You-Name-It-We-Got-It disease known to humanity.  We’ve glommed on these malfunctions like an octopus with a fresh clam, giving each one pride of place as we discovered it.  I’m old enough to remember when the War on Poverty slyly slipped its leash to become the War on Drugs.  As the real and imagined maladies piled up, we went looking for a cure — even though nobody had ever realistically diagnosed any of the problems.  Somehow, we just instinctively knew we had them and now it was only a matter of treatment.  Sound familiar?  Suddenly, the world was full of social engineers, who, like drug dealers, (legal and otherwise) eagerly offered us all manner of remedies while conspicuously failing to mention the price.  Their shtick was (and still is) “Don’t take our word for it.  Ask the politicians which government programs are right for you.”  We did, and as a consequence, ever since Lyndon Johnson proclaimed The Great Society we’ve been throwing money around like a crack addict who just won the lottery.

The problem is the scenario has never changed.  We’re stuck on black and white, somebody’s not feeling that well, and we never get to in-colour carefree recreation – forget candlelit dining.  Our social, political, economic etc. problems are not getting better.  We have more homeless people now than ever before, our kids are still stupid and the President of the United States still doesn’t understand economics – to name just a few.  The cure we’ve been prescribed for the disease we may not even have ever had doesn’t work.

However, there are serious side effects to all this social engineering.  No, our tongues didn’t fall out but they might just as well have.  We have become hopelessly dependent on social programs and have abandoned reason in a manic search for them.  In short, we have become junkies.  The drug is government intervention, and we can’t get enough of it.  Like all addicts, our entire focus is now on the dealers to deliver a bigger hit, a larger dose.  Every discordant note sends us back to them, every anxiety, every concern, every doubt.  We excuse our destructive behaviour and gloss over our need.  We lash out in riotous anger and frustration when we don’t get enough.  We beg, borrow or steal the money to support our habit; bankrupting our children in the process.  We don’t care what it costs anymore; we just have to have it.

Unfortunately, if we don’t do something soon we’re going to be permanently chained to our addiction, and no amount of get-well-quick schemes is going to help us.

Pinterest: A New Kid on the Block

As the Age of Ego reaches ever more dizzying heights, you would think there were enough Social Media sites out there to last us through the next millennium – but apparently not.  Besides Facebook, Google +, Tumblr, etc. etc. etc., there’s a new kid on the block.  It’s called Pinterest and he’s a tough guy.  How tough?  Here are some numbers (and you can read the whole story here.)  Nearly 70% of Pinterest users are female, over ⅓ have an income of $100,000.00 or more and the largest demographic is between 25 and 34.  Not only that, but Pinterest received 17.8 million unique hits in the month (month!) of February alone.  These are stats you can conjure with.  In fact, if you’re a 21st century Mad Man, you’ve probably fainted by now.

As of this moment, Pinterest is sweeping the virtual neighbourhood on the back of a very simple idea – a picture’s worth a thousand words.  Forgot all the “bringing people together” blah, blah, blah; the premise of Pinterest is, like that of all social media, there are a pile of people out there who think they’re absolutely fascinating, and they want everybody to know it.   What makes Pinterest different — and this is the telling bit — is nobody has to work at it.   The entire site is made up of pictures that people have posted.  It doesn’t matter whose picture it is nor of what, nor even where they got it.  It just has to be an image.  Other people get to comment (which usually amounts to “Cool”, “Awesome”, “Amazing” or “Great Picture”) and/or re-post it.  That’s it!

Actually, if you’re old enough, it’s quite easy to explain Pinterest’s wild success.  Way back in the dinosaur days, when corporate offices were run by suits and secretaries,  paper copies of grainy grey humorous pictures, sayings, cartoons and mild porno were circulated around the business world through the extracurricular use of copiers and fax machines.  This workplace folk art was everywhere.  It was passed hand to hand, snail-mailed, tacked on bulletin boards or office doors and taped to reception desks.  However, once email became the ubiquitous tool of industry, it physically disappeared.  Not quite!  Actually it was secretly living on in corporate email accounts and hard drives around the world.  Pinterest has just let it go public again.

I’m not bad-mouthing Pinterest; it’s totally cool.  For one thing, unlike YouTube, it’s simple; anybody can do it.  There’s no uber-personal interaction as with Facebook and Google+, nor any elaborate planning as with LinkedIn.  Basically, it’s spontaneous: you think an image is brilliant, post it, and carry on.  And unlike Twitter, which is an avalanche of banality, once you get through the crap, Pinterest is quite interesting — especially the humour section.

The Age of Ego will run its course, just like the Space Age, the Jazz Age and the Nuclear Age, but I have the feeling social media is culturally infinite.  It’s been going on ever since Cro-Magnon man got bored one night in a cave near Lascaux, France.

It’s Spring! Thanks, Mother Nature!

Thank God it’s spring.  This isn’t just a calendar page turn or a set your watch an hour ahead, this is the real meal deal.  Mother Nature is changing her clothes, and Father Time is watching.  We mere mortals are only a small part of what they both have in mind, but just like every year since protoplasmic slime came out of the water, it’s going to be spectacular.  Spring is to love what winter is to bundling up and reading novels.  As of today, the birds and the bees are back, and they’re feeling frisky.

Unfortunately, the spring solstice doesn’t carry the kind of punch it used to.  These days, it’s mostly living on its reputation.  We all know it’s spring, but, unless you’ve embraced the New Age, three millennia after the fact, who cares?  In a world of canned-air malls, thunderdomed sports stadiums and concrete canyon streets, Mother Nature could take a month off and nobody would notice.  While this is strictly true, ignore Mother Nature at your peril because she has a way of slapping the ego out of the most arrogant among us.  Primitive humans knew this; that’s why they treated the spring solstice with such respect.

Way back in the day, winter in the northern hemisphere was nothing to be trifled with.  Our species never physically adapted to the cold the way some of the other animals on this planet did.  However, despite our natural tendency to freeze to death, we insisted on living in climates that were inhospitable for four months of the year.  The only recourse for this stupidity was to outsmart Mother Nature using the tools available – fire and the skins of more practical animals.  We hid in caves during the worst of the winter weather and only came out for food and firewood.  Obviously, we survived long enough to understand that, regardless of how brutally Mother Nature tried to kill us, eventually she would relent and treat us like her special children again.  This was cause for celebration.

As we evolved beyond beetle-brow tough to early human clever, we must have realized that these constantly changing seasons were not random.  They had a pattern.  When winter was over, the leaves came out.  From there, only a Neanderthal wouldn’t put two and two together and realize, once the leaves started to fall, winter was coming back.  (That’s why there are no more Neanderthals, BTW.  Just sayin’.)  With that in mind, it wasn’t a Cro-Magnon leap to figure out that, with a little planning, we could gather food and firewood during the good weather when they were plentiful, store them away, and a smart caveman could sit out the winter in relative comfort.  Thus, instead of hanging out in the cave, shivering and getting skinny, Grog the Caveman had some leisure time to figure out a few other things.  For example, he’d notice all the signs of spring that we don’t care about any more.  Things like, when the kids started falling through the ice in the river it wouldn’t be that long before the good eating birds would come back.  Or don’t worry about the bear in the next cave, because he’s going to be asleep until the snow in the meadow melts.  This was important stuff that affected Grog’s survival.  The more he knew about when spring was going to show up, the more likely it was that he would be around to see it.

Unfortunately, climatology hadn’t been invented yet, and so Grog filed all these various things he was discovering under “Mother Nature: Whims and Idiosyncrasies.”  It made sense to Grog that Mother Nature was real.  He saw her all around him.  She made the flowers bloom, the wind blow and the angry black clouds blot out the sun.  So it followed that, when spring finally did come and Grog and his family were still around, he should be polite and say thanks.

These days, we don’t much care for Mother Nature.  For the last two hundred years or so, we’ve been fighting it out with her for supremacy on this planet.  There are those who say we’re winning and those who say we’ve already lost.  Unfortunately, the majority of us don’t seem to give a damn, one way or the other.  Our egos are so secure we no longer thank her — or anybody else — for our existence.  However, on days like today, when spring is in the air and all’s well with the world, I tend to get a little caveman humble.  I can see something in the crow building a nest and that sprouty green sprig that’s probably a weed.  Even in the city, there’s an early morning smell that isn’t diesel fumes.  Something is happening again this year, and it’s going to fantastic.  We should all be thankful we get to experience it all again.