Some time ago, during one of our many conversations in the front room of the Graham House, Steve, Ryan and I wondered to ourselves whether there was scientific data to support the notion that television makes you dumber, but we (perhaps due to our television-induced shortened attention spans) never followed up on the question. Perhaps this article can revive the conversation, and serve as an opportunity to reflect on our experience of technology (topic of mutual interest #2).
Christine Rosen’s article, “The Age of Egocasting,” appears in the most recent issue of The New Atlantis.
Excerpts:
TiVo, iPod, and other technologies of personalization are conditioning us to be the kind of consumers who are, as Joseph Wood Krutch warned long ago, “incapable of anything except habit and prejudice,” with our needs always preemptively satisfied. But it is worth asking how forceful we want this divining of our tastes to become. Already, you cannot order a book from Amazon.com without a half-dozen DVD, appliance, and CD recommendations fan-dancing before you...
Benjamin feared that our impatience would eventually destroy the “aura” of art and eliminate the humility we ought to bring to our contemplation of it. But we haven’t destroyed art’s aura so much as we have transferred it to something else. Aura now resides in the technological devices with which we reproduce art and image. We talk about our technologies in a way (and grant to them the power over our imagination) that used to be reserved for art and religion. TiVo is God’s machine, the iPod plays our own personal symphonies, and each device brings with it its own series of individualized rituals. What we don’t seem to realize is that ritual thoroughly personalized is no longer religion or art. It is fetish. And unlike religion and art, which encourage us to transcend our own experience, fetish urges us to return obsessively to the sounds and images of an arrested stage of development.
13 comments:
Andy, I appreciate your contributions of scholarly material for contemplation and discussion, but I would also love to hear your thoughts on these pieces that you drop without comment (save the hidden direction of your chosen excerpts). I'm beginning to wonder if you're hoping to use our comments for seminar papers. Not that I mind if you do, but I'd like to hear the logemonster take on our developing conversations.
I watch 18-23 hours of TV per day, and I still stand by my assertion that I'm smarter than all of you combin-
Oops, "Die Hard" is coming on, gotta go...
Yeah. There's no way I'm spending the time writing if it's just going to turn into a two-person conversation with Coye, not that that's a bad thing in itself, its just that Coye and I might as well be emailing each other about these things, not talking about it on an otherwise silent blog.
ouch, the ol' blog guilt routine.
A Few Musings:
The only really interesting point concerning aesthetics seemed to be Benjamin's criticism of mechanical reproduction. I suppose the shuffle feature on an Mp3 player may make a minor progression in the argument, but not much-- the great leap has already been made when we recorded the work and mass produced it. There are pros and cons to this, of course: a recorded song may not be as authentically cultural an experience, but it makes the experience much more available to many more people. Or does it?
The amusing thing about i-pods is that the more music someone has on theirs, the less time they seem to spend actually listening to music. Sometimes the bulk of their time is spent scrolling through lists trying to find exactly the song they want to hear (when, seemingly, they would only have stored songs they would want to hear). You may think I exaggerate, but I have made many trips into Chicago with i-pod listeners who only manage to listen to three or four songs on the entire drive.
"fetish urges us to return obsessively to the sounds and images of an arrested stage of development": art and religion hold the seeds of fetish within themselves. "Confessional" poetry and "pietist" religion are as negatively introspective as any of the "fetishes" that fall short of the aesthetico-religious glory our author seems concerned about. I think that fetish is more of an American problem than a technological one.
The author makes a grave mistake by claiming we have transfered art's "aura" to pieces of technology. Technology is a commodity in a way that art and religion can never be while remaining art and religion. Thus, no simple transfer of "auras" is possible.
A larger technological problem seems to me to be the counterintuitive phenomenon of cell-phone isolation. It amazes me that cell phones-- a technology that seemingly puts us much more in touch with one another since we are always available-- tend more often than not to isolate the cell phone user. Sit in a restaurant at lunch time and notice how many people are sitting at tables WITH OTHER PEOPLE and talking on the phone rather than with the other patrons or their servers. The phone replaces a face to face interaction with other human beings with a technologially-mediated interaction with a disembodied voice. There have to be consequences for that action on a wide-spread societal level. Not to mention the breakdown of distinction between public and private space (how many times have you overheard a cell phone conversation you really wish you hadn't).
Kind of funny that I read this post while watching television.
Aeijtzsche,
You were watching Die Hard instead of the Pats-Colts game. Shame, shame.
Actually, I believe I was watching an "I love the 80s" marathon. I Still am, actually, I haven't stopped watching since I last posted.
I never knew you had such an affection for big hair and spandex.
I've been saying for years that the 80's are coming back now just as the 70's did in the 90's.
Steve, do you see any sort of “American” 70s or 80s fads still floating around in Japan. Do you think that a comeback of those time periods might also appear in Japan?
I'd like to see some Japanese '70s and '80s fads catching on in the US-- 1870s and '80s that is: dig those Meiji threads!
Steve, the time is ripe for the 80's. Alternative, grunge rock like Nirvana has been displaced by rap/hip-hop/urban music and baggy and flannel has been replaced with a modernized Alex Keaton prep style with more hair products and heavier make-up, at least according to newspapers.
Dusty: no I dont. Everything American here is pretty up-to-date. And when there is a difference, it's not a decade gap, it's a culture gap.
Coye: Yeah I like 'em too! But I asked Japanese people about kimonos and hakatas, but they generally agree that they are too troublesome and inconvenient for daily life. But every once in a while you'll see an old lady wearing one.
Andy: That's what I'm sayin'
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