Anyway, point is, back then even a fool could see that online was the way to go — which is why none of the eggheads saw it, natch — and so I began building my rep as an internet education guru by getting in on the burgeoning social media platforms. Back then Facebook was the hip new cool thing (that’s how long ago this was), so pretty soon I was using it almost exclusively to communicate with my students. And right away I noticed an interesting phenomenon: The kids seemed to lose track of who their “friends” were. They were posting things that, as they say in movie trailers, were not suitable for all audiences. But since they had a zillion friends, I figured I might be the only adult, and I certainly was the only faculty member, among their “friends,” so I gave them the benefit of the doubt.
Fast forward a few semesters, and the realization hit me: It’s not that they don’t know, it’s that they don’t care. While I carefully curated my posts following the rule I had beaten into me in the corporate world — “don’t put anything on the Internet that you’re not willing to see published on the front page of the New York Times” — they had no problem sharing
everything, with
everyone. They were utterly shameless.
Fool that I was, I thought this would catch up with them eventually. I’d even try to warn them — “you guys know this is all
public, right? Meaning, when you go out for that first job, the HR department can see it?” Again, stupid on my part, because even though I knew that most HR ladies are just-graduated sorority girls themselves, I didn’t make the logical connection — they’re all on Facebook, too, posting the same kinds of stuff, so why should it matter? So long as the potential new hire isn’t obviously hotter and more popular than the HR girl, what’s the diff?
Not only that, but that goofy Frog Baudrillard was right — if it’s on the Internet, it’s not
real, in some way that just doesn’t make sense to us oldsters. Back in the days, the worst anyone of my generation would do is take petty little passive-aggressive shots at coworkers — “I spent twenty minutes cleaning up my mess in the break room, unlike
some people” — but the kids put it right out there: “@Becky is such a basic bitch, I hate her so much.” What to my generation would be an obvious invitation to take it outside just… wasn’t, for them, even though they were both right there on the same dorm floor and could easily have settled things the old fashioned way…
Turns out the Frogs were right about that, too. If you accept the basic PoMo premise that there’s no Truth, only perspective — and it’s like malaria, even if you fight it off, just being exposed to it compromises your system — then it follows that the only question that matters about any given act of “discourse” is: Is it
effective?
That’s how you have to judge everything in the Current Year. What standard of value are they using, such that this piece of discourse is effective and that one isn’t?
In the case of “I hate
@Becky so much,” the standard of effectiveness isn’t even “letting Becky know you hate her,” much less “socking Becky right in her smug bitch face.” The goal of that discursive act (as the Frogs would put it) is to get upvotes and shares — turns out Becky IS a bitch, and finally someone has said what we’re all thinking. Retweet!!!
A more concrete example, one I saw all the time in my teaching career before I finally pulled the plug on student interaction altogether: Becky got too drunk to write her paper last night, so she’s going to try the time-hallowed “Dead Grandma Story” in order to get an extension. But, of course, Becky’s wild Jagermeister adventure is all over social media… and she knows it. And she knows that I know it, since we’re “friends.” It just doesn’t matter. It never even occurs to Becky to go back and scrub that stuff out. She’ll just straight up lie to me, to see if I’ll bite, and if I don’t, well, no harm done. (Indeed, by the end — and this was still some years ago, y’all — she’d actually get indignant about it. What am I, some kind of creeper, for looking at her social media feed?).
It’s just discourse, and if that piece of discourse didn’t work, well, so what?
They really behave like that, y’all. And before you accuse me of failing in my duty of acting
in loco parentis (universities still make noise about that in new faculty orientation, or at least they did as of a few years ago), know that it wouldn’t make the slightest difference. Telling Becky that her behavior is unseemly, and that it reflects poorly on her personal integrity, that indeed it makes her impossible to trust, simply wouldn’t register. I know, I know, but trust me, y’all, I was
there, and it’s true — telling a Basic College Girl that she has a reputation to maintain is like asking your cat to factor quadratics. It just doesn’t compute….
….and if you’ve been following me through all the Froggy epistemology I’ve been avoiding discussing in detail, it’s easy to see why. None of it is
real. Becky knows she’s a special and unique snowflake, but the
reason she knows this is: Everyone agrees with her on social media, because they retweet and upvote her posts. Exactly no one in her Twitter feed is going to say anything like “well, that’s what you get for lying to your professor.” They’re not even going to say something like “damn, girl, you stupid for not deleting those selfies.” All
they’re going to do is upvote and retweet Becky’s post about that asshole professor who failed her paper for, like,
no reason, it’s so unfaaaaaaaair.
That’s the discourse that matters to Becky, and she controls it. Completely. (She has, of course, already blocked and banned anyone who might say otherwise from her feeds).
Now consider that this is the world of the upcoming
political generation. When I say that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez IS the Basic College Girl, I mean it. I also mean it when I say that idiot is going to be President of the United States here before too long, and do you see why I say I’m getting a real July 1914 vibe coming out of Tubman, DF? None of what’s actually going on out in the world is
real to them. Only Twitter is, and Twitter says a war with Ukraine will be a walkover, that China is no threat, but that there are a zillion “white nationalists” out there plotting insurrection. Given how accelerated time is in the Current Year, we could well see the Revolution happening at the same time as, or indeed even before, the Front collapses.
In some way I truly can’t understand, they’ve built this big beautiful wall around themselves — physically, in the form of razor wire and soldiers around the Capitol, but more importantly, mentally. Who is “Vladimir Putin,” anyway? Is he that creeper they had to block from their DMs?
