Guest column: Migratory influencers, is there where it’s headed?

On Oct. 15, 1958, the lauded broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow spoke to a gathering of national news directors, noting: “Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about 50 or 100 years from now, they will there find recorded in black-and-white, or color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live.

“Our mass media reflect this. If this state of affairs continues, we may need to alter an advertising slogan to read: LOOK NOW, PAY LATER. For surely we shall pay for using this powerful instrument of communication to insulate the citizenry from the hard and demanding realities, which must be faced if we are to survive.”

Ouch. Murrow, among others, had long railed against the increasing influence of corporate interests that were, to his mind, numbing the public and private minds of the electorate at large.

Still, as profound as the television revolution was in its day, I can’t imagine what Murrow would have made of the tumultuous rise of digital forces that have almost single-handedly overthrown every social, economic and cultural foundation we may have ever held dear.

How’s that for melodrama?

I was sadly reminded of this fact last week by a story that appeared in The New York Times. The report centered on immigrants traveling through the Darien Gap, the treacherous mountain pass located in Panama and Colombia.

In particular, it focused on Manuel Monterrosa, a 35-year-old Venezuelan who has traveled the Gap on numerous occasions to escape the poverty and violence of his own country.

The article covered Monterrosa’s decision to document the route and post his reports on social media outlets across the world. The story explained how he’d learned to live as a perpetual migrant, and his content and clicks earned him a living off YouTube advertising dollars.

In fact, it was enough to allow him to remain in Colombia.

Remarking on his unlikely success, he said: “Migration sells. My public is a public who wants a dream.”

In a more recent video, he documents passing a man collapsed on the trail and asks, “Is it inhuman not to help?”

I suspect he’ll need to answer that for himself.

I suppose my own question would be, “Is it inhuman to commodify and market death and despair, and still feel good about it?”

And yet, that is precisely the position we find ourselves in – marketing the desperation and horror of others as a viable private business enterprise.

Maybe I’m being overly sensitive. Maybe providing a “thumbs-up” for a man dying of exhaustion is fair game.

Still, for better or worse, advancing technologies have long been the hallmark of human expansion.

From the onset of spear tips to the caustic grind of the industrial age, technologies have necessarily – or unnecessarily – advanced the compulsion for simple convenience.

I mean, we thrived for millennia carrying buckets of water, and then came the wheel.

The rest is history.

And yet, even then, the primary world remained at hand. There was no filter to separate us from the fundamental realities of the physical world.

Firsthand evidence was not negotiable. Cold was cold, hot was hot, and the communication required to support the order was observed face to face and hand to hand.

And, perhaps more importantly, human communities still endeavored to recognize the earnest difference between popularity and truth. They were not the same. They remain so.

Yet, with the onset of digital, cellular and social technologies, that contrast seems to have lost its flair.

Fictional living seems to have become the perfume of choice. Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist and one of the founding fathers of virtual reality technology, wrote in his book “You Are Not A Gadget,” “We have repeatedly demonstrated our species’ bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good.”

And in lowering those standards and filtering our experience through mindless data, the current generation has seemingly lost the simple capacity to distinguish between a soft-boiled fiction and a hard-boiled truth. The technologies themselves have swamped the very boat we’ve been living in.

For this generation, selling out is hardly even a choice. It’s become part of the unnatural landscape.

How many “likes” did you get? Did you see that post about the alligator-skin nighties? How about that adventure video through the Darien Gap?

Aldous Huxley’s original nightmare, furnished in the flesh.

On Oct. 24, META was brought to court by more than 40 states on charges of designing social media platforms that are deliberately addictive and, among other things, fueling the youth mental health crisis.

Honestly, that is the consequential tip of the iceberg. It’s hard to overestimate the cultural, political, economic and educational disorder wrought by these technologies. They have, in most ways, overthrown the very art of being alive. Of being present. Of being fully engaged in the genuine world.

If I can quote Mr. Lanier again, “Social media is biased, not to the left or the right, but downward.”

Perhaps it’s time we recognize that fact.

Paul Wheeler grew up in suburban Chicago and traveled much of the U.S. before settling in Ottawa and now Streator. He writes about a variety of topics including art, writers, politics, history, education and environmental issues. He can be reached at newsroom@mywebtimes.com.