When I was a child in the 1970s, well before the birth of the music video, it
seemed the height of devious mash-up cool to watch some random film on the
TV, turn down the sound and soundtrack ourselves with a particular record
(Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon was a predictable favourite). We
would ooh and ah over the mash-up of images and sounds. The mind would
inevitably find echoes and collisions between sound and image, to agreeably
blessed-out effect, and it seemed wonderfully subversive to mix up two
different things at the same time...
How quaint. This collision of sound and image is of course no longer a
tripped-out naughty special experience, but the normal way media is consumed
in the home. I'll stick some music on, my wife will have the radio on the in
kitchen, and my son will be playing a video game, and somehow we're all
expected to make sense of what's going on, as I find myself tuning into the
gabbling voices on the radio and my son starts unconsciously nodding to my
music. Why, sometimes we even remember to eat and put on clothes first. This
mess of duelling media banjo is what consumers do in the face of
inexhaustible media choice, a functional strategy for cramming in as much
sound and vision into the day.
For years now I've thought that the prevailing modern aesthetic of clean white
surgical surfaces and long cold billowing white curtains is in part a
reaction against this overwhelming assault of sensory information. We need a
clean white surface on which to project all these media, which is why in
adverts people live in bare, austere, Zen-like temples of calm and peace.
Our minds are constantly at risk from being completely overwhelmed, yet who
wants to waste time when there's all this great stuff to consume? We're
always on. Why wait in a queue and do nothing, when you could be listening
to some great music on your iPhone, texting your friend, or surfing the web?
People have various strategies for dealing with the problem of too much
digital stuff. One strategy is rationing. For example, a friend has two
TV-free nights a week: the kids have accepted that the telly doesn't work on
those days, and quite happily do other things. We have equally strict rules:
for example, in our house no four year old is allowed to watch television
before he or she has brushed his or her teeth (we're firm but fair). One
friend was advised by his shrink that he and his then girlfriend should take
the television out of their bedroom, as it was a becoming a psychic drag on
their relationship. Another friend has a TV in his living room in the
winter, but hides it up in the attic when spring arrives. It gets him and
his partner out and about in the summer, and makes winter exciting because
it means the return of the familiar televisual hearth to the home. And there
are even the ones we call The Shunned, who don't let the filthy screen into
their homes in the first place (but they are not to be mentioned.)
Another modern coping mechanism is binging. This has long been a strategy for
geeks, who would hole up with a few vats of Jolt Cola and a mountain of
adult diapers to play World of Warcraft until they risked starvation
or deep vein thrombosis. However, the wide availability of DVD box sets
means that this indulgence is now available to anyone with a Blockbuster
card and too much time on their hands. I heard a Radio 1 phone-in in which
various digital bulimics phoned in to confess their most shameful episodes:
one had retreated for the entire weekend to watch Sex and the City
back to back. Another had spent every waking hour of the summer holiday
watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
The food comparison is a useful one, as understanding how we manage our desire
for media is really very similar to understanding how we manage our desire
to food. Who has the self-discipline to eat the way they know they should?
We know we should have grilled chicken and salad, but we eat the disgusting
hamburger anyway. Many of us probably think we should be, as Woody Allen
observes, looking at those great Picassos by Van Gogh, instead of wasting
our time watching Big Brother, but it doesn't seem to work out that
way. It's been pointed out that the huge problem with obesity in North
America and much of the rest of the developed world is in fact an
appropriate response, in evolutionary terms, to the unbelievable abundance
of sugar and carbohydrate available in modern affluent societies. Our cup
runneth over, and so do our muffin tops and wings of bingo. We do the same
thing in the face of more media than is good for us. My Virgin Media
Broadband package is called XL – for extra large.
Because let's not kid ourselves: we face overwhelming abundance in our media
diets. I have DVD box sets, 15 good feature films on my Virgin Plus box, a
great local Odeon, a cracking independent cinema just down the road, a great
local book shop, the extraordinary riches of the web, a Napster account that
gives me access to unbelievable quantity of great music, as well as films
galore at Lovefilm.co.uk and games to demo for free via the PlayStation
network. And barring some heavily trailed (and let's face it increasingly
likely) science-fiction apocalypse, the range of media that will be
available to our children and our children's children is only going to
increase.
As parents, we know that our actions are far more eloquent than anything we
may say on any given subject, and as individuals and as a culture we need to
sort out our own behaviour before we can expect our children to make sense
of this mess. If we don't set appropriate boundaries around digital stuff,
our kids won't be able to. Unfortunately this means not keeping a laptop
stuck down the side of the sofa so you can furtively check e-mail during the
umpteenth screening of The Incredibles. It means not getting so
hooked on The Wire that you end up staying up until four o'clock in
the morning because you have to find out what happens next. And it
definitely means not backgrounding your family and surfing the web on the
sly when you're supposed to be talking to them about their problems. I think
you all know what I'm talking about. So are you with me? Join me in a
digital media fast for one week, and let me know how you get on. But let's
start after the summer holidays. It'll be easier when the kids are at
school.
---
Michael Parsons helped to launch The Industry Standard magazine, and was the
launch Editor of CNET.co.uk
And yet the need to share is ever present, press a blog button on your browser and your friends are inundated, with your pet topic , thus adding to the overload. Ah well we were told we could not travel at more than 10mph in the past, and multitasking was yet not invented so i think we shall cope.
Julius Sowu, London, UK