10/13 2025
The air is getting hotter
There's a rumbling in the skies
I've been wading through the high muddy water
With the heat rising in my eyes
--- Tryin' To Get To Heaven, Dylan
One of the first lessons I heard which felt like I was learning something hidden was when I was like eleven was that even the hermit is defined from society, as he takes a conscious choice to distance himself from it. When you're eleven you think it's true so you can appear smart, even though you're not entirely sure you understand why. When you watch Pixar when you're twelve you think it's true because the hermit is misunderstood and he only needs somebody to believe in him1. When you're twenty-five you think it's true so it doesn't matter you didn't go vagabond when you were nineteen, because besides, you know the end-result would have been the same.
I was talking with a friend the other week about the new generation, and naturally we ended up talking about the future, and let's just say he wasn't overly optimistic but he was certain. Are subsequent generations "cooked", as they say, because of the instanteanous nature of social media and communication? Is the story of the hermit forever doomed to be filmed on a small low-definition screens2 with the world at all ages saying "that's a shame" at best, and a swipe of the thumb at worst?
Hot paragraph incoming, right of the presses, guess when it was written:
All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information. Some feel keenly that speedup has impoverished the world they knew by changing its forms of human interassociation. The student of media soon comes to expect the new media of any period whatever to be classed as pseudo by those who have acquired the patterns of earlier media, whatever they may happen to be. This would seem to be a normal, and even amiable, trait ensuring a maximal degree of social continuity and permanence amidst change and innovation.
If you said 1880, shame on you. You just guessed that because I asked you to guess, or you had Nietszche on your mind. If you thought of Kennedy and thick black-rimmed glasses you would be right. Marshall McLuhan wrote that in 1964, in his book Understanding Media. The central claim of the book is that we use technology as an extension of our bodies, and that there is a causal relationship there. When we create new technology, say TV, that affects how we see and interact with the world and others. Which is why, he argues, we ought to percieve the medium as the center of media studies, not the content of the message. Or, as its known more famously: The medium is the message.
And what is the medium, nowadays? Is it TikTok, that ever present monolith? I do feel it's getting colder out there, and only by getting closer to each other, sharing huts with each other, can we try to get warm. This decrease in distance, paradoxically, leads to less action. Why is it easy to convince yourself you're not addicted to nicotine, but so hard to convince others you're not a smoker if they saw you once when you were drunk and it never usually happens --- yeah, okay, you can stop now. I won't confront you this time.
In fact, I think we've transcended McLuhan's vision to the extent that we're nearing the breaking point. What is public and what is private? In a village, at least you get to lie next to your wife in the dark of night and listen to the stars. Now, who is to say Reddit won't be invited in the form of a post to /r/relationshipadvice? No place is safe for the allure of the gossiping eye and fingers. Besides, maybe they'll give good advice?
Although merely describing isn't terribly interesting. What is interesting is what this shift tells us about ourselves. What is the allure of the private turning public? Snowden sacrificed a lot on the idea that the private is sacred, only for people to shrug their shoulders at best, and hate him for it at worst. Or perhaps the worst is indifference, "What do you mean 'when snow, then ...?'"
Obviously, this is a complex issue without a single answer. But I do think part of the reason, for both issues, is that we want to be told who to be and what to want when we feel we're getting judged. But, and this is important, we want to retain the illusion of agency. Oh, I can't uproot my life and try to become a musician in Nashville, but maybe if American Idol comes to town... Will you audition? Well, no because that is broadcast and it may shatter the illusion, but if you'd enter then it would be your big break. What the electric evolution, and social media, has enabled is just this type of disconnect.
This also leads to another type of discussion regarding the power of media and ads. The Last Psychiatrist explains this well when he talks about Gossip Girl and the menage-a-trois episode:
So the airing of a menage episode mainstreams it for people who don't watch the show, and that's actually more powerful a cultural influence. i.e. If you're a fan of the show, the threesome is specific: those three people are doing it. For everyone else not watching, it becomes background noise: "oh, people are having threesomes now..."
In the social media age, this leads to another type of behavior: I can use the fact other people are justifying a behavior to justify my behavior to others even though the people I'm talking to don't know the context. They just have to know it's something people are talking about, which in this case is so broad that they might just nod so they won't feel like they're accidentally being insensitive. They might be telling the truth, after all.
This is comforting in a way, even though we would never admit to it. It is comforting to be able to explain away why I'm still working a deadend job and not doing anything --- why I've stopped doing anything --- in my sparetime. It is comforting to not having to care what to want, what to believe in, how to dress in the morning---I feel like I'm repeating the words of somebody much smarter than me so I'll stop here...
Where does that leave the hermit for the future? I think it's getting cooler, there's no getting around that. We're fighting for the attention of others, yet we can't wait to give ours away at the same time. Just make sure you shove a phone in the hand of the hermit so he can film his experience of being outside of society. I'm sure some will be angry at him, some happy for him, some will be indifferent. The end-result is the same though. No matter if he has a phone or not.
