The Satellite News Network (SNC) debuted in 1982 with this slogan. It would be more accurate to say that if you give them 18 minutes they will give you their world, the world as they see it, believe it, edit it. The internet does that instantaneously and overwhelmingly.
Artist Marina Abramovic displayed a piece called The Artist is Present at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. She sat a table inviting people to sit at the table across from her and meet here gaze one on one. She did this for seven hours a day March 14 – May 31, 2010. British Journalist, Hari Kunzru, says that her performance is “arguably the last great art spectacle of the pre-Instagram era.” He goes on to say within a few years of that launching “global visual culture” was forced “into the straightjacket of its thumbnail grid.” (“Easy Chair”, Harper’s, July 2024, 5).
Kunzru cites Virginia Woolf’s assertion that “‘on or about December 1910 human character changed.'” This noted the generational shift between Edwardian writers and the succeeding modernists. He says it is remembered for its remarkable specificity. He then cites June 2016 as the date “shared reality changed” by being “cast radically into doubt.” This was the year Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter “introduced the algorithmic feed. Instead of displaying content in chronological order, social-media platforms started trying to guess – and mold our experience by pushing some things and suppressing others, according to rules and procedures that they keep [NB the present tense] closely guarded” (Ibid., 6).
Growing up in the 60s-70s my father, working for IBM, continually said that a computer was only as good, reliable, useful according to what was put into it, that is, he said, “Garbage in garbage out.” It turns out that was coined by IBM programmer and instructor George Fueschsel in the early 60s. My father was attending IBM schools at the time and could’ve very well heard it from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.
Objectively, how would most of us class the billions of hours of video uploaded into YouTube? How about the innumerable words firing off on social media review sites? I too find that YouTube ‘how to’ videos helpful. Even the videos I consult to find out how to complete a video game challenge, I would not class as garbage. They are unimportant but as useful as our cooking, exercising, and reservation sites. But by far and away, the internet is garbage in.
Ergo, the second part of that adage is true. Here’s the rub: We are not just awash in the garbage, we’re consuming it. That brings to mind a 19th century adage: “You are what you eat.” The more ‘hot takes’ we consume, the more our worldview is no bigger than a thumbnail and a soundbite, the more connected we will feel but the more shrunken we will be.
Most people are trying to find a midpoint in their evaluating all things digital between tragedy and tool, between useful and useless, between Luddite and techie. Swirling in my head our the Proverbs questioning if out of the same fountain can come bitter and sweet and how fools return to their folly as dogs do to vomit. From Frankenstein to The Library of Babel to 2001 a Space Odyssey to Dune: The Butlerian Jihad, the warnings have sounded, yet we, I, still continue to give them more than 18 minutes a day. True, they give me their world, but I feel my body and soul slip sliding away.
