In a previous post I mentioned the bricoleur concept by Claude Levi-Strauss and how our culture became less open to abstract ideas (and therefore started to embrace narrow concepts).

Now, to give you an example of this principle applied to Social Networks, let’s consider this simple case.
I post an image on Facebook, it’s an image depicting something important, with a smart caption that makes the picture standing out even more, it gets lot of “I like”. People don’t even need to comment the picture. I get a sense of inexplicable satisfaction from all the likes the post is receiving. Is not that those likes are directly related to myself, but since we’re confused about the tools we use as we consider them a sort of an extension of ourselves, hence the extemporaneous joy.

Anyway, there’s no real need for the people who like my post to actually consider the picture and the story behind it, and so more posts go on, other pictures are being uploaded, other likes.

Replies to posts are not really required (the system still works) and if somebody does, it can be anything: a few words, another picture, a link and so forth. The complex richness of the human capacity to conceptualize, engage dialogues, it’s reduced to simple bits that yields a strict output: true or false, 0 or 1.

This little example seems a stretch, surely it’s more simple than that. Well, the thing is this is just the tip of a long process our culture has gone through.

Facebook is an extension, not a tool (it could be a tool but people usually don’t use it that way). A tool is an instrument we use to make things. An extension is how we project ourselves into things that surround us (cars, television, phones, gadgets and so forth.)

As an extension people just get lost in it. Facebook makes you wasting your time. 99% of the content on Facebook is useless and if you’re looking for something useful you’ve got to go through that 99% of garbage, that makes you wasting even more time. If you’re not looking for any interesting stuff, then you’re wasting your time in the first place.

Nowadays we’re experiencing (probably like never before) an incredible exchange of influences among the creative disciplines. This fast, continuous movement of elements across neighboring fields, should give arts new interesting perspectives to push ideas into unfamiliar lands.
Nonetheless the risk is that everything is going to collapse into a repetitive pattern, a system that cannot reinvent itself anymore, but only feed a liquid network where probably if no boundaries exist, no differences will survive either.