Curiosity of the Social World

Becoming a student once again and navigating the hallways of academia has offered insights that I never expected. As a youth, I always conceptualized school as being a place where grades indicate intelligence, cool kids smoke cigarettes and teachers mediate the distinction between critical thinking and engagement with popular opinion. Now, as a borderline mature student, it has become something else. Critically engaging with the problems and concerns that affect cultural representation, theories of knowledge and cognitive ability seems to lead further and further into a rhizomatic concept of education.

The inability to combat all of the encroaching and perhaps malignant forces which are enacted on human consciousness through whatever means, political, social or religious, is often an overwhelming experience. Treading through these layers of meaning and significances is an act of premeditated caution, one that invokes cynicism and doubt, but it also encourages resolve.

So much theory rests on reducing itself to critique, rather than offering any practical advice for how to actually change anything. Reading critical analyses and theories can easily offer inspiration and a desire to challenge existing ideologies. Invariably, many of these writings come to be insignificant as symbolic markers for change, as the concept of some disillusioned writer deeply entrenched in his or her room scowling at the world and writing all the problems they see in it, but without actually engaging with the problems themselves, is not particularly brave or revolutionary. If we begin talking of new paradigms of communication and the increasing hyperreality of the world or hybrid notions of humanity, then it would seem that we have some vested interest in taking notice of how and perhaps why cultural climates shift. However, just watching it all go by is no more useful than being an instrumental part of it. Being paralyzed by socio-cultural dogma and panoptic networks of interaction is also no help in taking back control of individual experience and these cultural climates. Under a Marxist model of production, the author is no more privileged than the reader, since both are merely part of a larger integrated structure. What this seems to suggest is that importance lies in challenging the systems under which we have no choice but to live, rather than simply making the best of a bad situation.

Consider the world of childhood and youth. No other generation has experienced the dramatic shift in what constitutes childhood than those of the last 20 years. Children have taken up an important and central role in the world of economic consumption. Advertising frequently leans heavily on the objective world that children experience, allowing multi-national corporations like Disney to incorporate their ideologically-charged messages into the world of childhood, expertly guised as harmless, innocuous entertainment that is 'good' for kids. Consider Pocahontas. Both protagonists exemplify supermodel or pop star qualities, and the film persists that love will conquer all while convering up the relatively unacknowledged principles of colonialism, namely deceit and genocide (in similarity with Pocahontas' characters, Disney's Aladdin was modeled after Tom Cruise). Let's face it, family films about mass murder might be a difficult sell. But reducing complex ideas into ideallic fantasies removes the possibilty for critical engagement, especially in the minds of children. When the Nazis turned the word 'propaganda' into a negative concept, it is doubtful that they could have conceived that this idea would expand to incorporate the world of youth consumerism and animated film.

The modern social world is turning away from individualized curiosity, instead becoming focused on ideal goals based mostly on media description. As existence becomes more and more fragmented throughout postmodern culture, power needs to be wrested from systems of incorporation and transferred back to the individual consciousness. This is not exactly an easy thing to do. It's easy to want a fast car, a wife with big fake tits, a big house packed with millions of gadgets and a job which offers unending promotions. Unfortunately, the more that is learned about economic systems, the more that problems and difficulties with these consumerist social constructs become forefront. If your fast car guzzles 200 litres of gas every 5 minutes, chances are you are not very receptive to environmental concerns. Eventually, your kids will curse your name as they pedal to their first jobs on communal buses which operate off bipedal locomotion because you and your generation invested in fossil fuels and went belly up once they were depleted through irresponsible use. Your wife with big fake tits might infuse you with pride and showmanship, but she may be trapped between being a wife to you and becoming an individual, confident woman who does not need a huge chest or rich husband to feel empowered. Or maybe she just likes your money. Your big house might be built by a company who destroyed a 200 year old forest to make way for several city blocks of cubicle housing, devoid of natural vegetation. The gadgets inside may simply be manifestations of your own inability to deal with your conscious self, perhaps sexually invalidated through working a job that closely resembles that of American Psycho's Patrick Bateman. Who knows. Maybe the dream is real after all. Let's just hope we remember what dreams used to be by the time we can afford a house, or better yet, actively work towards creating an environment where our dreams are our own.