Consumed by ironic consumption. Part 2

By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc. / LMMiami.com

  • Memes, memes and more memes.
  • Clogging the arteries of the interwebs like cholesterol of maximum viscosity.
  • Fails, hacktivism, dancing cats, surfing cats, grumpy cats, juvenile jokes, moronic hastily photoshopped visual puns, fake news, post truth, hatchet jobs, idle defamation, character assassination, trolling, trolling and more trolling, tabloid dirt, celebrity sex tapes, hacked private footage of bedroom activity, stolen selfies, cybernecking.
  • Guilty pleasures. Schadenfreude. Braindead escapism. Ironic consumption.
  • Every second you spend watching the latest hacked “nood selfie” of Jennifer Lawrence checking her stretch marks in the privacy of her hotel room in Berlin is a second you are not spending with your kids, your friends, your loved ones.
  • Or reading a good book.
  • Or taking a nap under a tree.
  • Every meme makes you a little stupid.
  • Stupider.
  • It sneakily lowers the bar of your taste and your judgement.
  • Don’t give that scum a second of your precious time.
  • Don’t grant it the luxury of your attention.
  • It starts as a joke.
  • It’s just ironic consumption.
  • A brief respite of silly fun.
  • Next thing you know, you spend precious minutes of your waking hours sifting through the trash to find that useful text message with the pediatrician’s personal cell phone number.
  • The time you waste consuming garbage is time you will never recover.
  • If you are “bicultural” like yours truly, you might have noticed that it takes us Latinos no less than ten text messages to organize a simple rendezvous.
  • When it comes to Anglos, usually two or three text message exchanges will suffice.
  • Now extrapolate that reality to the meme epidemic.
  • We Latinos, for the usual reasons, are particularly vulnerable to the plague.
  • There was a time not too long ago when I was an evangelist of memes.
  • I’d meet with clients big and small and pitch to them my firm conviction that the “ad” in its various formats was a dead vehicle.
  • Memes are the new thing!
  • NOT ANYMORE.
  • I take it all back.
  • We’ve gone too far.
  • We’ve saturated our cognitive space with useless detritus.
  • Memes are the STDs of our culture and influencers are propagating them.
  • Meme culture is flooding our kids’ malleable minds with an overstimulation of cognitive crap.
  • Ritalin anyone?
  • It’s happened before.
  • TV was supposed to revolutionize education.
  • Back in the day, glass-half-full thinkers envisioned a future of remote schooling through TV, where kids would be able to obtain an education without leaving the comfort of their homes.
  • Before we knew it, it was all about infotainment: the proverbial “wasteland” of partisan news, cheap soaps, sitcoms with laughtracks and Jerry Springer.
  • It is a good opportunity to remember the epochal speech by Newton N. Minow, Chair of the Federal Communications Commission in the JFK years: “… when television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your television (…) and stay there for a day without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set (…) I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland… “
  • And this was 1961.
  • Are we doing the same with the internet?
  • We humans have been known to deface many a great thing we create.

 

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