The Perils of the Pause Button

28 January 2007 | Community, Culture, Eventness, Media | Comments

Note: This is the second of two related posts. #1 was about the brilliant new Alfonso Cuarón film, “Children of Men,” and this one is about the eventness of seeing stories — films, plays, TV shows — with other people.

In an earlier post on this blog, I talked about how the infinite plenitude of On Demand Media can cause a paralyzing crisis of indecision.

Today, I want to talk about the flip side of that: the eventness we LOSE by being in control of how, where and when we consume story.

There’s such a thing as too much control.

Around the country, I give a fair number of talks about media and changing audience habits, and some 2005 data from Nielsen Media Research has stuck with me: the average number of TV channels that an American has available is 96.4, but the average number of channels watched by individuals is 15.4.

What the Nielsen numbers tell me is that Americans are pre-emptively filtering their media in an effort to surf the skyscraper-high waves of content pouring out of their televisions, computers and now cell phones every minute of every day. The more common explanation is that people are finding the content that they like: niche media is good because it gives people more choices so that they can find a more precise fit with their interests and beliefs.

Horse pucky.

I see a direct relationship between the flood of media and the rise of extemism, partisan politics, fundamentalism of all stripes and a general erosion of empathy with others. It doesn’t matter if you’re liberal or conservative, you probably feel that the majority of media out there is against you and yours. When did that happen? The internet may have put this trend on a triple espresso, but it started with cable TV.

With the rise of on-demand media, we can all skip the tough parts, ignore the voices that we don’t like, and talk amongst ourselves. We’ve built brick walls around our comfort zones. This is a problem.

“Children of Men,” as I wrote earlier, is a challenging film to watch, and I don’t think I’d have been up to the challenge if I’d seen it in my home, late at night, when the kids were asleep.

This is what happened with an entirely different movie on cable that my wife and I abandoned after 20 minutes: “The Aristocrats,” a documentary by Paul Provenza and Penn Jilette about a disgusting in-joke with infinite variations that comedians tell amongst themselves as a kind of jazz riff. Friends who saw it in the theaters LOVED it, but I know that the mental pressure of other bodies, of the disruption that you cause by getting out of your seat and climbing over people to leave the theater, kept many in their seats.

The discomfort of the movie was equalled or exceeded by the discomfort of a potential judging glance from a fellow moviegoer. That’s a key part of eventness: you represent your row; you have a duty to the people with whom you are sharing an experience.

Does it take a village to watch a movie? Not usually, but some movies, some stories, cannot be borne alone.

We need more of that unwillingness to give up in life, but on-demand media makes it easier and easier to abandon an experience the moment it gets hard.

Sure, I watch film and television to relax, to check out of the hurly burly of my everyday life for a while, but art is more than just decompression. Art enables us to see things freshly, but in order to see things freshly we can’t watch only the things with which we are already comfortable.

The Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky called this “ostranenie,” and it is variously translated into English as “enstrangement,” “defamiliarization” and “making it strange.”

Ostranenie is the difference between “recognition” and “seeing.” It denatures our automatic cognitive processes of recognition and lets us “see” things as if for the first time. Here’s a useful quotation from Shklovsky’s “Theory of Prose”–

In order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art.  The purpose of art, then, is to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition. By “enstranging” objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and “laborious.”

It’s important to point ot that on a cognitive level “seeing” is a lot more work than “recognizing,” and humans are, generally speaking, what social psychologists call “cognitive misers.” The reason a week on vacation feels much longer than a week at work is because you’re seeing things without recognizing them.

Eventness helps us see things; on-demand media enables us to avoid seeing in favor of things that we merely recognize.

In a world of increasingly loud, angry voices and tightly closed ears, I believe that we need more seeing, more ostranenie, more eventness, and for people to sit all the way through more films like “Children of Men.”