What, other than the pursuit of pleasure, for instance, are those modes of living that our contemporary world encourages us to participate in? Almost every activity that involves an audience as part of its milieu (though not necessarily as part of its function) has now, in the early twenty-first century, been brought under the influence of social media, which, when monetized, measures the value of a thing by its popularity. Which I suppose is no different a system than that of the advertising industry that preceded it, and that reached its heights during the age of television, except that now the consumer, or the user (or whatever name you would give the individual that is its target), is involved in the work of hysteria and exaggeration and popularization that was once the responsibility of the brand. For with the democratization of technology has come a democratization of our utility as pitch men and women for our own so-called ‘value’, or that of others.