Society and technology: The tragedy of our times

Editor’s Note: The following post is adapted from a paper I wrote earlier in the year about humanity and communications and how the introduction and expansion of technology, through social media platforms like Twitter, Skype and Facebook, has had a paradoxical effect on creating a more unified society.

 

“A single death is a tragedy; one million deaths is a statistic.”

~Joseph Stalin

 

What is tragedy? The famous sociologist Georg Simmel said culture is tragedy. I bring up Simmel not to get into a tangled, lengthy discussion on structuralism or the fetishism of money, but only to hammer the point that culture is, unmistakably, tragic. Culture, for me, is false consciousness, an inaccurately disarming sense of interconnectedness perpetuated by cultural industries which “create and distribute television shows, movies, newspapers and magazines” (Oetzel, 2009) to close continental gaps between people. Emerging and evolving technology — social Internet platforms like Facebook, Skype and Twitter — increases social group sizes, but we remain as disconnected and distant as ever.

A Liverpool-based study conducted by evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar found that the primate mind “imposes a limit on the number of relationships that individual primates can sustain in their mental model of their social world” (Liverpool, 2003). When it comes to the human mind, the study found that we can conceptualize “150 for social group size, and 12 for the more intimate clique size” (Liverpool, 2003). The implication is obvious: We care more about those in our immediate social groups than those in our periphery ones — what is distinguished in Oetzel’s book as “ingroups and “outgroups” (Oetzel, 2009).  The Internet is supposed to diminish the stark visible lines drawn in the sand separating “ingroups” and “outgroups,” but it actually intensely reifies the “ingroup.”

Culture is commonly used as a misnomer for an all-inclusive ingroup. Televisions shows, movies, newspapers and magazines exist ideally as inroads into countries’ political and economic climatology, justice systems, ethics, values and practices, but they are merely a touristy snapshot of “popular culture,” or the “products and artifacts that are shared and understood by most people” (Oetzel, 2009).  Inquisitive by nature, we often seek knowledge about countries and their inhabitants. But when those countries befall tragedy, do we not turn a blind eye? As of 2011, the United States has committed more than $41 million in aid to the Haiti earthquake relief effort (Guardian, 2011). But aid doesn’t qualify as empathy. Using Dunbar’s research as a theoretical premise, I can’t help but wonder if Americans who are not directly affected by the disaster can really, truly sympathize with Haitians’ continuing plight? No matter our technologic inroads to their country, can we overcome our own biology, or do those people merely exist as faceless caricatures in our psychological representations?

Televisions shows, movies, newspapers and magazines exist ideally as inroads into countries’ political and economic climatology, justice systems, ethics, values and practices, but they are merely a touristy snapshot of “popular culture.”

This is the tragedy of culture. Technological interconnectedness, no matter how sophisticated, cannot account for culture’s intellectual blind spot. In reading Oetzel, it becomes clear that the American media, made up of five corporation — Time Warner, Walt Disney, News Corporation, Viacom and Bertelsmann — (Oetzel, 2009), is implicated in forming a pixilated, and oftentimes inaccurate, account of global culture. Each American, however, in consuming 3,499 hours of media in 2006 (Oetzel, 2009), is contributing to their own worldwide ignorance. Culture, at least in America, exists as an ideological echo chamber, a narrow-minded sampling of what people perceive to be true about particular groups.  Yet what Oetzel refers to as popular is produced by media conglomerates as “a commodity within a capitalist system” (Oetzel, 2009). By Marxist accounts, a commodity is “an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another” (Marx, 1932).

Culture is supposed to have a certain duality. That is, it is not supposed to exists solely as “an object outside us” but as one that we interact with — that effects change on us just as much as we on it. The popular culture apologists view global culture as a way to facilitate “better intercultural communication” because it gives people world perspective and “creates a space where national boundaries can be minimized” (Oetzel, 2009). Except more often it does not minimize national boundaries so much as authorize nations to encroach upon other countries’ practices and customs.

Scholars have criticized the influence of American popular culture and “high culture” — the “artifacts associated with ‘good taste’ and the ‘best elements’ of a culture” — on developing countries (Oetzel, 2009). Such an influence can give way to cultural universalism, where a “single set of standards” are used to interpret others’ behavior as “good or bad” (Oetzel, 2009), and the homogenization of culture, where “cultural uniqueness” is trivialized my the “creation of media products” (Oetzel, 2009). These media products create “large-scale cultural industries” designed for the “largest common denominator” (Oetzel, 2009). They are, in my opinion, highly discriminatory. Culture is not supposed to authoritarian, a one-size-fits all shoe for the world. Culture is supposed to be representative and all-encompassing — thus the term intercultural.

As it stands today, culture is tritely thought of as a mixed, ethnically diverse matrix of social connections, but I remain unmoved that we are intimately closer to each other than at any other point throughout the history of humanity. The Internet might exist as a virtual port for other countries into the September 11 attacks, for Americans as a virtual dock into Egypt and Libya’s political revolution, Haitians’ ongoing struggles to cope with the devastating earthquake and the Japan’s national disaster, but we are not cognitively tied to those affected by those trying circumstances. In that sense, we remain as emotionally displaced as ever. That is why, at the end of the day, Stalin got it right: To us, one death is a tragedy; one million in another country is a statistic. This is our culture. This is our tragedy.

(Bibliography redacted)

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