I was reading this link by Stephen King about how many hours he spends in front of a screen of some sort. It's the usual kind of shocking thing that people say when they first deny, and then come to realize by actually paying attention, about much time they actually spend staring at the liquid crystal.
I haven't finished the article yet, but I wanted to note down a few thoughts first before i finish it. First, is my reaction to this knee jerk response about staring at a screen. that it is somehow operably stupefying the user by some kind of osmotic process that wheedles its way from the flat crystal across the short distance to my face and into my brain. I know that, culturally, we are supposed to be embarrassed by this relationship. That friends we create are not real, relationships must be tawdry, time wasted and intellect sapped. The usual.
What it doesnt account for is the idea that this time can actually be more productive than f2f junkies and their sweaty palm slapping jelly time they spend with their fellows. There is nothing inherently smart about this process. Fleshy fraternaties have plenty to not recommend them. I mean, it could be a shared public expression or (lunch) counter protest, but it also could be a terrible mob; it could be a dinner with friends, but it could be a lynching. The f2f medium is just that. It is an open protocol that can be turned for good or bad purposes just like any other medium. Sorry Marshall, I know you think the medium is the message, and i don't categorically disagree, but just like anything, swinging to the extreme (in this case to through down a whicked awesome turn of phrase), is probably not where the answer lies. Perhaps its better to say that the message is not only the message, but carries some burden or relationship with the medium it sits upon.
And anyway, i think you were mostly talking to people who try to study communications to remind them that, in addition to studying what is being said, it is as equally important to study how the message is transmitted between entities.
In any event, the popular thing to do is to criticize the newer medium. Partially because entrenched interests inevitably support their native environments against all newcomers and sew the seeds of distrust around anything new that escapes their immediate business model.
Something else that was interesting was the idea the King brought up about Orwell. You tie the screens from 1984 to the screens of 2009. I agree, there is a parallel between the citizen time-use breakdowns with many people staring at (re)education material. But it struck me that there is one striking difference between now and that novel. In the novel, the government was staring back. That is not (directly) the case. But it got me thinking.
The government may not have eyeballs on your eyeballs, but that doesn't mean someone isn't watching you. Orwell was working from what he knew. In the wasteland of television, the camera was the tech dejour. It made sense that the controllers (whoever they may be) would employ the state of the art tech to do their bidding. But, as the CCTV found in Britain, cameras have a big problem. they are eyes without brains. It's very hard to use them to track broad populations. For that you need math. And the captured image is only recently beginning to be understood in a way that will feed math.
Instead, the monitoring that goes on is more modern. Instead of watching my face or what i'm doing as i'm slogging around my apartment, it turns out to be much more efficient to track the swath of snail slime as the user lopes his or her way through the digital realm. Sure, you can't figure out what they may do when they leave their computers, but fortuntately people are doing that less and less and as a result, their slime wake is getting bigger and bigger. Additionally, they are taking their tech with them so you can see begin to track their tech trail as it stretches out across the default world as well.
Now that's scarry.
But i got a little off track in this stream of consciousness. Originally, what i wanted to say was that spending your time in front of the computer screen is not automatically negative. It is what you do with that time or what that time enables you to do that will ultimately be the determining factor for the progression of humanity. Personally, I think the internet and the desktop computer have been great forces for creative expression that have had a long winter slumber in the mass-mediated culture days of the past half-century. People are creating. they have the tools to make things worth creating. And that is the thing that, if we are to be saved, may finally put people on a footing from which they can become modern and engaged in their world. and feel like they can be engaged. and feel like they must be engaged.
Of course, this is all chaos, but then...i'm a chaotic. If you didnt want that kind of answer, you shouldn't ask me.
I haven't finished the article yet, but I wanted to note down a few thoughts first before i finish it. First, is my reaction to this knee jerk response about staring at a screen. that it is somehow operably stupefying the user by some kind of osmotic process that wheedles its way from the flat crystal across the short distance to my face and into my brain. I know that, culturally, we are supposed to be embarrassed by this relationship. That friends we create are not real, relationships must be tawdry, time wasted and intellect sapped. The usual.
What it doesnt account for is the idea that this time can actually be more productive than f2f junkies and their sweaty palm slapping jelly time they spend with their fellows. There is nothing inherently smart about this process. Fleshy fraternaties have plenty to not recommend them. I mean, it could be a shared public expression or (lunch) counter protest, but it also could be a terrible mob; it could be a dinner with friends, but it could be a lynching. The f2f medium is just that. It is an open protocol that can be turned for good or bad purposes just like any other medium. Sorry Marshall, I know you think the medium is the message, and i don't categorically disagree, but just like anything, swinging to the extreme (in this case to through down a whicked awesome turn of phrase), is probably not where the answer lies. Perhaps its better to say that the message is not only the message, but carries some burden or relationship with the medium it sits upon.
And anyway, i think you were mostly talking to people who try to study communications to remind them that, in addition to studying what is being said, it is as equally important to study how the message is transmitted between entities.
In any event, the popular thing to do is to criticize the newer medium. Partially because entrenched interests inevitably support their native environments against all newcomers and sew the seeds of distrust around anything new that escapes their immediate business model.
Something else that was interesting was the idea the King brought up about Orwell. You tie the screens from 1984 to the screens of 2009. I agree, there is a parallel between the citizen time-use breakdowns with many people staring at (re)education material. But it struck me that there is one striking difference between now and that novel. In the novel, the government was staring back. That is not (directly) the case. But it got me thinking.
The government may not have eyeballs on your eyeballs, but that doesn't mean someone isn't watching you. Orwell was working from what he knew. In the wasteland of television, the camera was the tech dejour. It made sense that the controllers (whoever they may be) would employ the state of the art tech to do their bidding. But, as the CCTV found in Britain, cameras have a big problem. they are eyes without brains. It's very hard to use them to track broad populations. For that you need math. And the captured image is only recently beginning to be understood in a way that will feed math.
Instead, the monitoring that goes on is more modern. Instead of watching my face or what i'm doing as i'm slogging around my apartment, it turns out to be much more efficient to track the swath of snail slime as the user lopes his or her way through the digital realm. Sure, you can't figure out what they may do when they leave their computers, but fortuntately people are doing that less and less and as a result, their slime wake is getting bigger and bigger. Additionally, they are taking their tech with them so you can see begin to track their tech trail as it stretches out across the default world as well.
Now that's scarry.
But i got a little off track in this stream of consciousness. Originally, what i wanted to say was that spending your time in front of the computer screen is not automatically negative. It is what you do with that time or what that time enables you to do that will ultimately be the determining factor for the progression of humanity. Personally, I think the internet and the desktop computer have been great forces for creative expression that have had a long winter slumber in the mass-mediated culture days of the past half-century. People are creating. they have the tools to make things worth creating. And that is the thing that, if we are to be saved, may finally put people on a footing from which they can become modern and engaged in their world. and feel like they can be engaged. and feel like they must be engaged.
Of course, this is all chaos, but then...i'm a chaotic. If you didnt want that kind of answer, you shouldn't ask me.
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