Adam Curtis - documentary film maker

I read an interesting article in yesterday's Observer. Adam Curtis is a documentary film maker. His new work "All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace" begins on BBC2 on 24th May.

In the Observer interview he made two points which I found particularly interesting. He criticised the "1960's" assumption that nature is a self regulating system and that there is a natural order, both in nature and society. In such a society our role is to stand back and enable, rather than to change and respond to and reinvent.

Curtis regards the system ideology is a myth, since inequalities between humans mean that politics, or the intervention and protection of the weak is always necessary. He considers globalisation and internet communication and the proliferation of managers to be part of the network society. But in this de-politicised society, power actually lies with corporations and financial institutions which use a corrupt and weak political system for their own ends.

Secondly, according to him, the private dimension of this society is an obsession with personal feelings, as expressed in reality TV and on social networks such as Facebook, and Twitter, both owned by large corporations. This apparently sincere and open expression is of the same network ideology, and masks not only real issues within our own societies but ignores other societies where people are completely powerless and often very poor - but who have "different myths about us as human beings, things that the west longs for, but which make us terrified".

I am not sure I agree with much of this mainly because of the obvious benefits of the internet as an incredible and revolutionary means of communication and expression. But I do find Curtis' analysis interesting, particularly his critique of social networking. Maybe that is because I don't really get it!