-PSPodBerryCamPhoneMan, w/ portable, folding Bluetooth keyboard & joystick (sold separately)
We vote for a way of life with our time.
And increasingly, when we are not at work
or asleep, we are in the media torrent.
Steadily more inhabitants of the wealthy
part of the world have the means, incentives
and opportunities to seek private,
electronic companionship.
To a degree that was unthinkable
in the seventeenth century,
life experience has become
an experience in the presence of media.
--Todd Gitlin, Media Unlimited
The computer on which I am typing this makes four movies, five web browsers, six games, 13.9 days of music and more than 300 digitized books available to me. As I type, several more songs and two movies are in the process of downloading. I just turned the television off, as the DVD that was playing the video versions from a favorite album just ended. A song is playing on the laptop and several browser windows are open to blogs and newspaper sites.
I like to scan those sites on Sunday so that I can copy articles of interest and paste them into a text editor. Having the text version allows me to use a website to transfer those articles onto my electronic book. There are currently 31 titles of various lengths and subject matter available to me on the e-book, which is within arm's reach on the bed, as are the television and stereo remotes, an iPod, my cellphone and two soft-cover books. The bookshelf three feet from me houses 48 books--I didn't bother counting the stacked magazines.
If the list of available distractions seems excessive, consider that the cable-less television receives only 14 channels, three of which are in Spanish and several of which come in intermittently at best via rabbit-ear antennae. Also missing from the gadgets one might expect to find in a home at this socioeconomic level are a gaming console and digital video recorder. A few board games and several still cameras are as close as we come.
I list all of the media in the home primarily to provide context. We are connected, conscious consumers making choices with our disposable time and income. There is power and satisfaction in this for us. Infotainment fills our lives. During the last state of the union address, how easy it was to google image Dennis Hastert to confirm it was he sitting behind the president. I walk through my personal music video as I shut out the other Target shoppers by public use of an iPod. Media presence might more more accurately be described as an enveloping fog.
Celebrating the "Best Ideas" of 2005 in its December 19, 2005 issue, Business Week heaps praise on the process of Tuning In to the Channel of Me: "In a mobile, digital world, people want to shape their own channel by choosing from all the available content out there. They want companies to sell them capabilities and options . . . Users will collaborate instantaneously with others around the globe. Business is there to provide the tools. The Channel of Me makes consumers the ultimate producers." Inspiration, creation and self-expression, all fulfilled by the ability to place products artfully throughout one's day--to define and express one's self through the conscious arrangement and delivery of the work of others.
I'm sure in some culture/art/lifestyle magazines, the Channel of Me finds its parallels in critic's discussions of "found" media, everyday appropriation and cultural collaging by Y generation wunderkind. We DJ our days and program the hours away--life impresarios. Consumer-as-producer is certainly a seductive conceit.
It is an idea that eases my first world guilt, strokes my sense of intellectual worth and validates my consumption. But this enthusiasm for programming every waking moment of my life has become, for me, difficult to defend. Like anyone with the time and cash to fill every non-working or -sleeping moment with words, sounds, pictures and video, I want entertainment. Whole swathes of the world, however, are not easily reduced to a quicktime movie, and most of the world never even gets a camera pointed its way.
What I don't want anymore is non-stop entertainment. I enjoy the songs the iPod puts in my ears as I rake leaves or exercise at the gym. What bird songs did I miss, and who decided not to speak with me because of those head-phones ringing in my ears? I like my computer and the words and images from all over the world that it delivers to my lap. It steals from me though, my peace, my potential ideas and time with my wife.
One of the things that my laptop showed me was the response that evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller offered to the question posed to hundreds of scientists and thinkers, "What is your dangerous idea?" Miller's idea is simple: In discussing Fermi's Paradox, and the apparent scarcity of aliens in our corner of the universe, he says, "They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they are too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don't need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today." Our faces buried in screens, fingers stuck to keys and buttons we make mountains of zeroes, ones and light. With a power outage, not even dust would be left.
I imagine all those screens, and look at the two glowing in this room with me now. This doesn't feel as much like the Channel of Me as it does a parade of phosphors signifying nothing. Distraction is so easy, it is meaning that escapes me.
I read a book thirteen years ago called The Age of Missing Information by Bill McKibben. Written prior to the internet explosion that happened a couple of years later, the book deals primarily with the television medium. One recommendation McKibben makes is for viewers to use their screens in a very different way: Turn them off and keep looking. As a window on the world, the television screen (or computer monitor) is perceived to be inclusive, informative, entertaining. What can they do without being turned on?
In our "Channel of Me" sensibility, consumer choices purport to mean individuality and creativity, but none provide an opportunity for contemplation or reflection. Having used McKibben's suggestion, I can share that there are moments of clarity in looking at the dark screen. If it seems foolish to stare at a TV turned off, how much less foolish is it to stare at its glowing for several hours a day--every day? Is what we look at as important as that we are looking for most of our waking hours?
When I first tried this, ambient light made a mirror of the TV screen. Quiet filled the room, and I saw myself quite clearly.
I like to scan those sites on Sunday so that I can copy articles of interest and paste them into a text editor. Having the text version allows me to use a website to transfer those articles onto my electronic book. There are currently 31 titles of various lengths and subject matter available to me on the e-book, which is within arm's reach on the bed, as are the television and stereo remotes, an iPod, my cellphone and two soft-cover books. The bookshelf three feet from me houses 48 books--I didn't bother counting the stacked magazines.
If the list of available distractions seems excessive, consider that the cable-less television receives only 14 channels, three of which are in Spanish and several of which come in intermittently at best via rabbit-ear antennae. Also missing from the gadgets one might expect to find in a home at this socioeconomic level are a gaming console and digital video recorder. A few board games and several still cameras are as close as we come.
I list all of the media in the home primarily to provide context. We are connected, conscious consumers making choices with our disposable time and income. There is power and satisfaction in this for us. Infotainment fills our lives. During the last state of the union address, how easy it was to google image Dennis Hastert to confirm it was he sitting behind the president. I walk through my personal music video as I shut out the other Target shoppers by public use of an iPod. Media presence might more more accurately be described as an enveloping fog.
Celebrating the "Best Ideas" of 2005 in its December 19, 2005 issue, Business Week heaps praise on the process of Tuning In to the Channel of Me: "In a mobile, digital world, people want to shape their own channel by choosing from all the available content out there. They want companies to sell them capabilities and options . . . Users will collaborate instantaneously with others around the globe. Business is there to provide the tools. The Channel of Me makes consumers the ultimate producers." Inspiration, creation and self-expression, all fulfilled by the ability to place products artfully throughout one's day--to define and express one's self through the conscious arrangement and delivery of the work of others.
I'm sure in some culture/art/lifestyle magazines, the Channel of Me finds its parallels in critic's discussions of "found" media, everyday appropriation and cultural collaging by Y generation wunderkind. We DJ our days and program the hours away--life impresarios. Consumer-as-producer is certainly a seductive conceit.
It is an idea that eases my first world guilt, strokes my sense of intellectual worth and validates my consumption. But this enthusiasm for programming every waking moment of my life has become, for me, difficult to defend. Like anyone with the time and cash to fill every non-working or -sleeping moment with words, sounds, pictures and video, I want entertainment. Whole swathes of the world, however, are not easily reduced to a quicktime movie, and most of the world never even gets a camera pointed its way.
What I don't want anymore is non-stop entertainment. I enjoy the songs the iPod puts in my ears as I rake leaves or exercise at the gym. What bird songs did I miss, and who decided not to speak with me because of those head-phones ringing in my ears? I like my computer and the words and images from all over the world that it delivers to my lap. It steals from me though, my peace, my potential ideas and time with my wife.
One of the things that my laptop showed me was the response that evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller offered to the question posed to hundreds of scientists and thinkers, "What is your dangerous idea?" Miller's idea is simple: In discussing Fermi's Paradox, and the apparent scarcity of aliens in our corner of the universe, he says, "They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they are too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don't need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today." Our faces buried in screens, fingers stuck to keys and buttons we make mountains of zeroes, ones and light. With a power outage, not even dust would be left.
I imagine all those screens, and look at the two glowing in this room with me now. This doesn't feel as much like the Channel of Me as it does a parade of phosphors signifying nothing. Distraction is so easy, it is meaning that escapes me.
I read a book thirteen years ago called The Age of Missing Information by Bill McKibben. Written prior to the internet explosion that happened a couple of years later, the book deals primarily with the television medium. One recommendation McKibben makes is for viewers to use their screens in a very different way: Turn them off and keep looking. As a window on the world, the television screen (or computer monitor) is perceived to be inclusive, informative, entertaining. What can they do without being turned on?
In our "Channel of Me" sensibility, consumer choices purport to mean individuality and creativity, but none provide an opportunity for contemplation or reflection. Having used McKibben's suggestion, I can share that there are moments of clarity in looking at the dark screen. If it seems foolish to stare at a TV turned off, how much less foolish is it to stare at its glowing for several hours a day--every day? Is what we look at as important as that we are looking for most of our waking hours?
When I first tried this, ambient light made a mirror of the TV screen. Quiet filled the room, and I saw myself quite clearly.
posted by Tom Morton at 2/04/2006 03:25:00 PM
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