Flight
December 17, 2008
At last, the semester is over. The last couple of weeks was immensely stressful, even if I forced myself to take it slowly – think, wee b, think! Use your head! A simple command, but with water leaking in everywhere, keeping head above said was not trivial. I remind myself now and then that this is – in the large context of things – a fart in cosmos. Soon I am off – going to rellies in Denmark, play with kids, eat duck and drink scnapps.
Media science was the last exam, and I find it enormously interesting (I shall not make any prophesies or guesses there, I refuse to think about those frantically scribbled pages during four hours of coffee-and-red-bull-induced hyperactivity). The good thing about media science, is that I can disagree. There are methods, a tad of research, some statistics, a smattering of history, a smidgen of social science, a piece of psychology, a pile of popular culture and a pail of common sense. A delightful breakfast kedgeree, endless discussions and sink-teeth-into material.
In media science, they talk about TV and media as a means of flight.
The theory says that the industrial revolution gave us spare time, mind numbing routines and a fragmented life separated from seasons and rhythm. So a need for diversion. TV as a place to disappear into; another world, to vegetate and receive, with no means or need to respond or act. To either rest the mind from real life, or empty ones head: meditation, in a way, a forgetting of self. A flight into fiction, adventure, the mundane, the fantastic, the trivial: as long as it is not your own life. So here we are, the cream of evolution; with hundred channels and nothing on.
Fair enough.
But here is my thougths: I think the fragmented meaninglessness of the news and media in general (read: gossip) generates this need to “go somewhere else”, somewhere simpler, where rules are followed, good guys good, bad guys detectable. It seems to me to be self-generating. The shorter, more dramatic and contextless the news become, the stronger the need for a simple world somewhere. We cannot truly process the information.
As a virtual friend quoted: Be careful who you listen to, because their voices will influence your own.
I knew people who lived through, spoke like, and was more engaged in Coronation street than what was around them (what was around them was admittedly dismal, but so is Coronation street..). And I know a guy, and he is as smart as they come, who says that he stopped reading books because he’d rather live life than read about it. But his TVconsuption is up there among the best.
We choose the flightpattern. Mine at the moment is going south.
January 1, 2009 at 7:07 am
Happy New Year to you, Boblet, with a whole cloud of smiles surrounding my greeting. It’s been an overwhelmingly busy holiday season because I chose to keep writing and posting, but we’re nearly back to more routine and commonplace life, and I’m finding a bit more time to enjoy the writing of others – like you!
I’m startled by the phrase “media science”. It seems like an oxymoron, particularly since science implies at minimum the ability to replicate results. But I’m not the one to be meditating on media science at all, since I rarely watch television any more, and when I turn it on, I listen more than watch.
I know this. The reality shows have little to do with reality,the news shows present very little that is new, and what passes for light entertainment is more often than not vapid and non-engaging. The more the programmers and producers try for a “bang-up” show, the more their results seems to end with that poetic whimper that Eliot made so famous.
I have an acqaintance who is writing a book. She has advisors who tell her she must “write to the market” if she wants to find a publisher for her work. Her current writing is terrible, which she acknowledges – and the problem seems to be that she is writing to sell, rather than writing to communicate her vision, her truth and her convictions in her own voice.
Perhaps the media sorts suffer from the same difficulty. We get 100 channels and nothing to watch because they are writing only to sell, without clarifying their vision or cultivating a voice with which to communicate. They don’t have a flight pattern – they’re grounded, not even able to take off.
If we had fiction, adventure, a sense of drama and complexities equal to those found in life to engage us, it would be one thing. But the proliferation of channels and the need to fill air time with something – anything! – at the lowest possible cost has left us with the Home Shopping Network, mixed martial arts, a dozen Judge Judy spinoffs and other such delights.
That’s the view from this side of the Atlantic, anyhow.
Best wishes for the coming months, from someone always eager to listen to your voice!
Linda