Smaller Thoughts

This is the least romantic thing I have ever read. If a man ever proposed via Internet I’d probably find him, punch him in the face and run off crying.

A Pink Tart: How Not To Commemorate Your Engagement: Ask Your Friends To Digg It.

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The commentary below is the reason for reblogging this. Deep stuff.
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This is something I want to write a Big, Important Essay On one of these days, but my thesis in a nutshell: Our generation has fully absorbed Guy DeBord’s conception of the Society of the Spectacle. We have fetishized the media so much that creating a media “event” of our lives has subsumed the event itself. We are the people who take photographs of the surf on a Hawaiian vacation while everyone else is reveling in the sand.

The Twitter proposal is apropos because any intimacy and meaning the couple derives from the “romance” of their proposal is entirely from their salivating over audience response. See the female character’s cry for Diggs. She’s lusting after the spectacle rather than the proposal itself. She’s fetishizing the effect instead of the cause.

We have become the passive tourists of our own lives, creating meaning out of life experiences by turning them into theater for consumption by others. Thinking of oneself as a “brand” is the ultimate dehumanizing consequence to unfettered capitalism, and it’s destroying our society.*

*(Yes, by blogging, one contributes to this phenomenon of spectacle-creation. Hypocrisy, blah blah. But Jesus. Is nothing personal?)

(via jgh)

Source: maura