A friend recently summed up the Facebook-era of online activity succinctly, stating “it feels as exciting or thought provocative as watching an episode of Ellen.” Adding the phrase, “it feels like your Mom’s internet.”

In many ways we agree. The whole online experience today feels like a time-wasting trip to the suburban mall. Maybe it’s all the senseless chatter, commercial signage and snapshot voguing that echos the food court environment. Or maybe it’s all the young girls.

That’s the one, great step forward in the social media era. It brought women, younger and older, into the once exclusively male and geek dominated domain of “cyberspace.” For a flash back to how this used to be, five seconds spent on ChatRoulette (link) will show you an anonymous webcam portrait of dudes in dorms, masturbating schlongs and more dudes in dorms. In other words, good luck finding women outside of the fluff communities of Facebook, Twitter, online retail and homogenized blogging.

Whereas all this social media stuff is purported to be keeping everyone connected, in reality it’s all just pretending your famous. Facebook / Twitter / et al are only about  emulating celebrity culture, with  followers tracking your every minute move like  stalker fans. It is just ego stroking,  borrowing from the culture of tabloid soundbites and newsmagazine fandom. As if everyone in corporate marketing is a rockstar wannabe. There is no real communication going on here.  Just people who are sold on the US Magazine / Access Hollywood view of America, and now simulate it being by both groupie and B-list famewhore.

Whereas this publicity environment of constant press-releases used to be the domain of the media, today the situation is brands trying to figure about how to excite all these miniature self-promoters to buzz about their latest product.

It wasn’t always this piss poor. The release of AVATAR has got us thinking of what a pussy time 2010 is. Which is even more depressing, when you where you consider where James Cameron took pop-culture in 1991.  Not only was the sequel to Terminator set to drop, with Schwarzenegger in his prime -- the movie also featured the first glimpse, found anywhere, of the Appetite for Destruction follow-up.

For those that don’t remember, you couldn’t hear the new Gn’R tracks prior to the radio release. This was pre-”internet,” at the point where dial-up BBS systems were only trading Jerry Garcia bootlegs between “computer people.” Billy Idol hadn’t yet debuted the Cyberpunk album. During the promotion of which, Idol introduced evening news audiences around America to the concept that they could send “electronic mail” to him at something called “The Well.” Which was a  seminal moment for all Q-Link account holders, a few years before everyone got onboard dialup with the arrival of AOL. Here is a glimpse of that era, with Idol talking about recoding an album on his Macintosh computer -- in 1992! What a fucking hero.

Not to mention the other HUGENESS of T2 also featuring the debut of CGI characters as we now know it. Essentially changing movies from being narrative and performance based accomplishments, to breaking all sorts of box-office records by co-opting the booming video game audience. And… all of this hitting you in one sitting. That’s a movie experience in 1991.

Now Hollywood is like -- “Enjoy washed-up actors portraying screensavers, in a script that basically rehashes Dances With Wolves and simplifies it down to ‘really good guys’ vs ‘really bad guys.’” Let’s call that innovation! Literally. In a concurrent release, they put a CGI wolfman on screen with the snarling provided by Anthony Hopkins. Who then battles Benico Del Toro’s CGI wolfman for 10 mins, in a wordless “action” scene that involves  two video game characters ignoring the rules of gravity. What’s the audience supposed to say? “Wow. I was so blown away. I’ve never seen carnage like that outside of XBOX before…”

OK, so AVATAR is a box-office success in being an experience that’s akin to an amusement park ride. So what’s with all the rancor and resentment? What’s with the hate? Well, it also won the Golden Globe for Best Picture and seems on it’s way to winning an Oscar. Point being, what the fuck is up with all these critical accolades? It’s like some warning that our society in 2010 is completely bankrupt, unable to discern crap from hype, and seems on the brink of imminent collapse. In other words, there’s a lot more morons around now.

In AVATAR, the idea of using some cat-scan device to transfer the guy’s mind to a clone creature is a repurposing of every old virtual reality movie from the 90′s. Consider the movie FREEJACK where Anthony Hopkins abducts Emilo Estevez, wanting to transplant his consciousness into Estevez. He even looks forward to banging Rene Russo, who is dating Estevez and has no clue about the planned  switchover. This mirrors the perspective used in STRANGE DAYS, which allows the audience inside the mind of a dude having sex with Juliette Lewis, as a form of voyeuristic virtual reality. Ironic, in that STRANGE DAYS was directed by Cameron’s ex-wife, Kathryn Bigelow.

Vintage Virtual Reality

Mentioning the above movies will get a lot of blank stares. THE CELL, VIRTUOSITY, LAWNMOWER MAN, etc… How is that everyone can recite every film made in the 70′s but no one remembers any of the above titles? We think it has to do with them being films from a generation stuck between baby-boomer idiots and their newly minted clones -- the vacuous, under 30 post-boomers that cream their pants over Twitter. Generation X,Y,Z, or whatever you want to call it sort of missed out on having a voice. They weren’t able to break the grip baby-boomers had on the media and at the same time are nowadays too old to be at the cutting edge of social media. They’re older than the CEOs of Twitter and Facebook. Younger than George Lucas and James Cameron.

So nowadays, we have to hear 20-somethings talk about how this AVATAR 50-something director is a genius, for watering down movies. Meaning, now our contempt goes both ways -- up and down, age wise. Thanks AVATAR for pointing out a new generation of morons, to follow in the footsteps of baby-boomers and post-boomers.

In the 90′s, the online digital frontier was portrayed as a hellish amalgamation of psychedelic drug imagery and stark, representational minimalism. A simulacrum of reality that characters could explore and exploit. These degenerate and grimy futuristic worlds, set on the cusp on Y2K, always had a sense of possibility and limitless potential. Today, the internet is all about branded social media apps to assist fat suburban moms in tagging cat photos.

Forget the earlier clip of Timothy Leary whispering into an effigy head, as people wave speakers to feed audio into this Cyberpunk album… That’s too interesting and weird for today’s culture. As is watching Juliette Lewis grind on your crotch from some pervy POV angle. Since then, what it takes to be considered cutting edge has dulled quite a bit. Now we have to accept blatant rehashing as innovation. The Lawnmower Man era had a much better appreciation of what the internet was capable of.

All this Facebook shit today is weak.

Tags: AVATAR, Facebook, James Cameron, Postboomer, Twitter, Virtual Reality
Posted in: General