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Social Media

Descent into kitsch~II

The way we love to engross ourselves in the popular parlour debates on television, splitting hairs on bytes that range from the inane, the exotic, the histrionic to the crude and the vulgar, we have lost ourselves to what Jean Baudrillard calls ‘the ecstasy of communication‘. And when this obsession is supplemented by social media, our virtual walls and posts become a kind of anonymous monitoring screen of the hyperreal expressed through the scenic repetition of disembodied sounds and images, an addictive process of acting out that is located neither in the actor nor on some remote stage

Pay, pal

Prime Minister Scott Morrison is currently legislating through the Australian parliament the News Platforms and Digital Media Mandatory Bargaining Code Bill which tries to level the playing field by ensuring that social media behemoths such as Facebook, Google, and others are not the sole big beneficiaries of the advertising revenue which the content they aggregate and push through on their platforms attracts while the media companies which have spent money, time, and effort on creating original content get shortchanged.