#ShallowValues

[hollowmaniac]

Manifestations of Superficiality in Contemporary Culture

Manifestations of Superficiality in Contemporary Culture - To illustrate the critique more comprehensively, it is necessary to underline the highly diverse forms underpinning the superficiality of contemporary culture as well as the range of their social functioning. The following remarks are primarily illustrative – without the claim of being exhaustive. Superficiality reveals itself in all subject realms of our life-world – in cosmology, ethics, naturalness, and labor. We prefer to move in virtual worlds, which we sometimes find more appealing than the "ugly, real world". Technology enables us to remove ever more limitations. Servomechanisms and feedback control systems provide stability.

But here we are extremely partial and superficial in focusing so resolutely on the practical problems – without even realizing that the synthetic engineer has severed all referring threads, has cut the ground from under the feet of the outer world, which collapses in ruins of rebounding energy. Our ethical deliberations become increasingly restricted to legal and economic questions – as if ethical insights arising in the realms of literature and philosophy no longer held. After all, the end justifies the means. In science, creativity becomes replaced by technique and methodology. Least effort is our guiding principle in problem solving, in political action, and in the educational mission. Chasing the ready-made leads us to the superficial life-world.

Social Media Influence

Social media influence. The flows of entertainment media vary with the influences of "pull" media. Radio, TV, and contemporary film require specialized equipment and a relatively sophisticated infrastructure. In each case, the entertainment delivery includes standardized commercial breaks associated with top-heavy ownership, appeal filters associated with the interests of advertisers, and rigid censorship with respect to certain interested segments of the population. At the turn of the 21st century, entertainment and self-promotion focused increasingly on the computer as an information and communication system became common through mobile telephones and the Internet. It becomes possible for youth worldwide to watch one’s favorite shows, to communicate with friends, and to publish one’s own creation without censorship via platforms. Freely available software provides the means to edit home movies and to record, mix, and disclose one's own musical creations. Involving an increasing openness toward publication, an alternative to traditional encyclopedias offers a different approach. Blogs and emails allow the possibility of real or virtual one-to-one interactions, and, for some, communication changes from passive consumption to political activism through social platforms.

The information of top-down entertainment media becomes complemented by "pull" content, which can be social interaction supported by repositories of cultural information. It is stated that the temporary nature of content on platforms supports the appeal in that interaction is visual, generational, linked with participants’ private lives, and, in contrast to traditional TV, unrestricted by specific time and space. The desire to interact with what seems to be current and "live" traction conceals some of the established top-down influence. Inter-functional gains of "pull" communication have not been scrutinized. Especially certain platforms gain in influence while others drop in appeal. In play, inter-functional complementarities come promising avenues for future developments in communications. As a result, political and critical "pull" communication, only to a limited degree, remains. Flash mob challenges, for instance, seem to have a one-time effect only. Said spoon-fed changing flavors of influence debate diminishes the impact of alternative viewpoints on society as a whole.

Consumer Culture

Consumer culture has its origins in an urban and industrial tradition that is based on an expansion of non-subsistence-based consumption activities and a growing leisure extension for the capitalist mode of production. This interest in the consumption sector of the economy has been set aside in sociological analysis. The culture of consumerism promotes a manner of life centered on roles and status functions within the realm of an advanced capitalist culture, and to fulfill them, one competes and struggles relentlessly. We live in a consumerist social order with values almost exclusively established by consumption.

This non-material culture is not a homogeneous thing; rather, it is multi-level. Together with the subculture connected to the organization of political power, there also exist several subcultures that are formally autonomous and independent from each other. The particular aspect of this situation is that consumer society, on the one hand, integrates other social institutions, but on the other hand, this is done with a grievous structure of the political system and perfected juridical guarantees. One of the more evident open contradictions is between the level of freedom offered by political systems of modern society and that of the economic sphere, with symbiotic dynamics between policies and the economy.

Celebrity Worship

The ever-increasing cult of celebrity worship that pervades contemporary culture is extraordinarily pervasive. Culture has always concerned itself with the whims of the rich and famous. This has been perpetuated by an age of electronic communication that seems given over to the dissemination of the details of the lives of those that we envy and admire the most, our movie and television stars. Celebrity worship for many people is a way of life. Careers are wasted in pursuit of an illusory opportunity to take up some kind of meaningful connection based on hero worship that is at best unlikely, and at worst complete fantasy.

Paradoxically, the unreality of celebrities is precisely what some people desire. We intrude into the lives of the rich and famous in order that we might have our fantasies fulfilled. The attraction of soap operas, or the gossip magazines that reveal which star has been knocked off the drugs wagon, is oddly built upon the fact that the lives of the people who entertain us are so much different from our own. Their wealth, power, and influence help us to escape, if only momentarily, from the mediocrity of existence. Celebrity, after all, compensates for a reality that we, the majority, are denied. Their lifestyle unlocks the doors of material possibilities. We look up to their biographies as a reflection of what we would like to be and what others would like to be: famous, happy, rich, and recognized. Their glamour and success obscure our own deficiencies, while their semi-divine status pacifies our thirst for hero worship.