The Fractious Facebook Feed

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 10 November 2015.

Orestes Pursued by the Furies by William-Adolphe Bouguereau

As far as the fractious Facebook feed, I personally feel this is the last gasps of print literacy and individualism trying to assert itself before it is dragged down into the tribal world of the ear, of the chorus, of the chthonic, of chaos, of chanting, of moira, of ritual, of dithyrambic dance.

When you really look, those exchanges and the resultant fragmentation are still due to the paradigm of print. The fact that this fragmentation is accelerating is due to the extreme anxiety produced by retribalization and the end of 400 years of print literacy. When I ask my students about Snapchat, they have a hard time explaining their enthusiasm for it. But they are largely uninterested in Facebook and increasingly uninterested in Twitter.

If McLuhan was right, we should see new types of social media with an even greater emphasis on the ear. Snapchat has deemphasized print literacy, but it's still visual. The movie Her seems to imagines that social media will go in this direction.

Then again, maybe the fragmentation and fighting is our reacclimating to the levels of conflict present in the tribe.

But Henry Ford would not partake in this tribalizing impulse. This is the full flower of mechanization, specialization, isolation, fragmentation. Tribalizing is the opposite impulse: stay in the same community or village and experience the conflict!