"He's convinced that we don't really understand television.

"He's convinced that we don't really understand television. He says the idea that you can break television up into discrete programmes is wrong. He believes television is really one long construction of a giant story out of fragments of recorded reality from all over the world that is constantly added to every day, and has been going on for 70 years."

"I'm afraid I disagree with you that social media is a new kind of politics. It's a powerful new tool for helping to organise people – that is true. But what it really doesn't offer is a new kind of political way of changing the world. And, in fact, the belief that it does, and the failure of that, can lead to the most conservative situation."

So information becomes a currency through which you buy friends and become accepted into the system. That makes it very difficult for bits of information that challenge the accepted views to get into the system. They tend to get squeezed out.

I think the thing that proves my point dramatically are the waves of shaming that wash through social media – the thing you have spotted and describe so well in your book. It's what happens when someone says something, or does something, that disturbs the agreed protocols of the system. The other parts react furiously and try to eject that destabilising fragment and regain stability.

I don't think these waves are "political" in the liberal way the shamers proudly think. They are political in a completely different way, because they work to create a static, conservative world where nothing really changes."

Double plus good!

http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/jon-ronson-interviews-adam-curtis-393 ⟲

Jon Ronson in Conversation with Adam Curtis

The two old friends chat about TV and social media shaming.