When I read On Photography a few years ago, I was blown away by Susan Sontag’s prescience about how central the image has become in our culture (over the word): an object of constant consumption, a form of communication, a signal of ownership or status, etc… Via photography, and also advertising, TV, and now, Instagram, Facebook, etc. I was longing for her to still be around to philosophize about the Internet, memes, social media. (Like I wished Andy Warhol had been alive to see RuPaul’s Drag Race when it launched in 2009.) She would have had such fascinating insights into this new common consciousness.
In this interview she gave in 1977, she touches on this contemporary consciousness, which at the time she identified as an “electronic, multimedia, multi-tracked McLuhanite world,” the embryo of our 2019 way of being. This sounds like an insightful description of our social media lives. It really sounds like the Internet, it’s amazing:
“You can say anything in any context–the nature of modern communication systems is that anything can be said, any context is equivalent to any other context so that things can be placed in many different contexts at the same time, like photography. But there’s something profoundly compromising about that situation. Of course, there’s also a great advantage to it because it allows for a liberty of action and consciousness that people have never had before. But it means that you can’t keep original or profound meanings intact because inevitably they’re disappointed, adulterated, transformed and transmuted–it’s a world in which everything is being recycled and recombined and things are being reduced to a common denominator. So when you launch an idea for a fantasy or a theme or an image to the world, it has this tremendous career that you can’t possibly control or limit. And that’s perhaps another more immediate reason why one is tempted to be silent sometimes. You want to share things with other people, but on the other hand you don’t want to just feed the machine that needs millions of fantasies and objects and products and opinions to be fed into it every day in order to keep going.“
From Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview by Jonathan Cott (Yale University Press, 2013).