OK, I admit, this is hardly an original perspective. But I’m not talking about all same awful (and true) things we’re used to hearing about Social Media… I want to talk about a phenomenon that I’ve begun to notice more and more lately.
Back when Hollywood used to respect blue collar American workers, There was a common movie trope that you used to see all the time. The hourly wage worker in a dead-end job who refused to be stuck in that job.
At some point in many films, the star or the villain would come across an American working a menial job… security guard, gas station attendant, toll booth operator, etc etc. In many cases, the person in that job would be reading a book on a topic like screenwriting, or engineering. The idea was aspirational, that you don’t have to be stuck in a dead-end job. You can better yourself through education and hard work, even while you’re busy with a job you hate.
In ROBOCOP one of the villain’s henchmen comes up on a gas station attendant studying a Trigonomentry book. The bad guy taunts him by calling him a “college boy” before he lights the station on fire and blows it up.
In 8MM, the guy who works the cash register at a porn shop in Los Angeles, played by Joaquin Phoenix, has a book of poetry hidden inside the pono mag he has with him behond the register.
In COCKTAIL, Tom Cruise keeps books on business theory hidden behind the bar for the slow times. He doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life slinging drinks… he wants to own the bar.
And in WORKING GIRL, Melanie Griffith spends her entire commute on the Staten Island Ferry poring over Newspaper articles looking for out of the box ideas she can use to advance her own stagnating career in finance.
There’s always been a debate over whether Hollywood drives social behavior or simply reflects it. In this case I think Hollywood was reflecting a phenomenon that actually used to happen… especially among recent immigrants who were (and are) well known for taking whatever job is available and working really hard in order to pull themselves up by their bootstraps (to use a phrase now considered to be a tool of White Supremacy).
But as I walk or drive around our major cities in 2021, I’m noticing a new phenomenon. When I see a security guard, or a doorman, sitting on a stool having a down moment, what do I see them doing? Not reading books, that’s for sure. What you see instead, is that damned phone in one hand, index finger of the other hand relentlessly scrolling up.
They’re reading social media.
Sometimes it’s the small details that reveal the rot at the heart of a failing empire… this seems like one of those details. Making yourself better is hard… endlessly strolling through social media posts is easy… and we are, increasingly, a lazy, mediocre, unserious and unmotivated country. It’s no wonder we are choosing the latter over the former.
Come to think of it, why am I wasting time reading this when I should have been reading the book in my Kindle app.