It’s something that I’ve often considered after seeing Mike Wesch’s excellent lecture on digital ethnography and youtube,  The Machine is (Changing) Us: YouTube and the Politics of Authenticity.  In this lecture Wesch quotes Henry Canby speaking in 1926 about the side effects of urban life and cities, saying that, “what we are encountering is panicky, an almost hysterical attempt to escape the deadly anonymity of modern life … and the prime cause is not vanity … but the craving of people who feel their personality sinking lower and lower into the whirl of indistinguishable atoms to be lost in a mass civilization”.  Wesch goes on to describe this sense of personal loss as a possible cause for the current voracious public interest in the subjects of popularity and celebrity, explaining that if the conversations of a the culture are happening on television, which is essentially a “one way conversation”, then unless you are on television you are without a voice.  This would certainly help to explain the ever increasing number of blogs and vlogs online, but it is somewhat disheartening to consider the search for an audience as a search for recognition amongst a culture losing its sense of self worth.

Given the sheer volume level and noise produced by this massive chorus of voices, each striving to be heard above the others, is it any wonder then that Guy Debord has claimed that the world has turned into a ‘society of the spectacle’? (Debord, 1977, quoted in Rose, 2007).  A society where each voice needs to be louder than the others if it is to be noticed?