This week one of my favorite bands, Arcade Fire, released a new song entitled Reflektor, and after listening to it a few (i.e 100) times I have to say it fits remarkable well with the our lesson on loneliness. The song has many references to the ways that technology and the Internet make it difficult to connect with others, take the opening lines for example;
“Trapped in a prism/in a prism of light/Alone in the darkness/darkness of white
What Win Butler is saying there is that we are trapped in this idea of loneliness created by our computers (the darkness of white screens?) distancing us from real human contact? In the second verse he gets more in-depth
Now the signals we send/are deflected again/We’re still connected/but are we even friends?
Here the point is made that while we message, e-mail, and tweet to each other every day, those messages never really reach us in real way. There is a distance between what we want to say and what get’s sent, creating this fakeness between us and the ones we supposedly love. And that last line, about being friends really gets to me. I looked at my messages on Facebook and saw the people I talk to, some every day, others not so much. While I was looking a thought started to creep up, would any of these people I call friends, that I share my life with, still care if I didn’t have a Facebook. I think it’s that fear that keeps us attached to social networks, it’s easy to expand our social circle, but it’s a lot harder to accept that our actual friends encompass a much small network.
Entre la royaume des vivants et des morts
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