The invasion of individuality4 reading minutes

Umberto Eco isn't even cold yet, and already, on Facebook and other Twitter sites, the now famous quote is flourishing: «Social networks have given the right to speak to legions of idiots who, before, only spoke at the bar, after a glass of wine, and caused no harm to the community. They were immediately silenced, whereas today they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the imbeciles.»

So true and yet so paradoxical! Even social networking enthusiasts would recognize the emptiness of their exacerbated egos? The word to the people, for the people, against the people, doesn't seem to bother manipulators of all stripes, saboteurs and other populists; witness some SVP (but this is also true of left-wing revolutionaries), taking offense at anything and everything, for example against a pope who has done them no harm other than advocate peace. «He's not my pope!»

Always this me, always so little intellectual interest, especially when it comes to a message as universal as Francis'. Everyone invites themselves onto the net; even Le Regard Libre is there! Maybe that's why we're trying, little by little, to switch to paper, a step forward that some would call regression, but for us a legitimacy that the pixels of our screen don't possess.

Be that as it may, the continuous flow of all individualities, however (un)interesting they may sometimes be, has become inescapable. To give it a raison d'être, constructivists will call it a «socialization arena». Amen to that! Anyway...

It wouldn't bother us - we wouldn't even bother with it - if large-scale stupidity only concerned adults with a (slightly) trained mind. Where it gets more serious is when those who are easily manipulated - children, but sometimes also the elderly - fall prey to it. On the Net, on TV, on their cell phones, in their bedrooms, even on the family dinner table, the most crass vulgarity is everywhere. O plethora of Ch'tis in Los Angeles, reality TV, swearing, violence, pornography, hatred at your fingertips.

The tragedy of it all is that for such an abundance of media and individual nonsense, there must be a demand to match! Maybe that's why all the interesting programs - that is, programs other than soccer matches and cooking classes - don't come on until after eleven o'clock in the evening.

Hypocrisy, then, hypocrisy in the name of the ego and consumerism, hypocrisy on the part of those who castigate the spelling reform and yet are incapable of writing a French sentence! Umberto Ecco perished like so many others, swept away by the hecatomb raging at the beginning of this year. It would seem that this tornado of all pretensions is decimating the last thinkers like a plague, leaving us with a humanity of fellow human beings, robots, the last men, trained and nourished by violence and vulgarity.

On my way to the university cafeteria today to get a cup of tea, I listened with a distracted ear to the radio announcing a disaster: «Facebook blocked for an hour!» If this is the case, may your last action be to give a «Like» to the Regard Libre before unearthing one of our paper versions and leafing through it on your balcony in the sunshine. It might not be so bad after all!