Paul Carr writes in Techcrunch – After Fort Hood, another example of how ‘citizen journalists’ can’t handle the truth. Paul describes that during the Fort Hood news blackout, Twitter updates contributed to the disinformation. Basically everything that was reported was totally wrong. Paul Carr looks at the story as an opportunity to reflect about the role of the social media:
“Two weeks ago, I wrote here about how the ‘real time web’ is turning all of us into inhuman egotists. How we’re increasingly seeing people at the scene of major accidents grabbing their cellphones to capture the dramatic events and share them with their friends, rather than calling 911.”
To illustrate his point Paul links to This American Life clip. The suburban “Lord of the Flies”:
Actually I think the problem is that people don’t value the present. Imagine you meet a celebrity, almost as a reflex people look for a camera. This always seems so odd to me. A moment of meeting a real person doesn’t exist unless memorializes in a photo. In other words a moment exist in the future as a photograph to share or in the past as a photograph to frame, but never there is any value to the moments of live interaction with a person, as if there are no expectation that anything significant could be happening in the now. How did the present get erased from our existential psyche?
Further Reading:
TED – Daniel Kahneman on Two Different Modes of Happiness or Experience vs. Memory
The Present Time as a Historical Detour
Zizek on Alter Ego and Tarkovsky’s Stalker
