From: Kafka Dreams To: still Subject: everything that rises must converge Date: Thu, 28 Mar 2002 15:54:47 -0500 I ate in our cafeteria the other day - Tuesday maybe - and sat right under the new TV they installed in the corner. It plays CNN pretty much continually, which is a little weird but I guess it's more agreeable than daytime soaps. I glanced up at it while my dining partner was food-occupied and thought "it looks like a visually noisy web log." See - it's got the constantly scrolling bits along the lower middle bit, just above the bottom block with some a random headline on the left bottom block and sports scores on the right bottom block. Sometimes another ribbon running along the bottom of the bottom. Plus shorthand notation for other stuff along the left, probably financial junk. I might've switched the sports scores and the financial junk, though. It's often just numbers to me. And the talking head (in the upper right hand corner) equals today's bloggy rant/update. And I thought "maybe tv really will converge with the Internet somehow, but I bet it won't be like what we expect." [I've been thinking a lot about convergence lately, cuz we are converging of course... By "we" I mean ISPs and we're converging with Telecoms. Course that's a nice name for it like RIF'd instead of FIRED or LAID OFF. A better word would be "blended" as in locked into a container together with a spinning blade at the bottom. The object of the game is to knock each other into the blade. I first noticed convergence with sneakers. It is my theory that sneakers, particularly the big sporty hi-tops, are in the midst of a design convergence with SUVs. I don't know why. Maybe it has something to do with petroleum.] Anyway, back to CNN - after admiring the utterly overwhelming and fairly non-sensical design, I actually read the featured headline in the bottom left hand box: "PLAYBOY SEEKS PICTURES FOR THE WOMEN OF ENRON." And my brain kinda did that thing that record players used to do where they'd skip a groove. The music was still there, but the needle hadn't dropped into that particular groove to play it. And I thought "that can't be real" but I'm not particularly prone to hallucinations and if I was, I'd like to think they wouldn't be so damn boring. Now I'm wondering whether we as a race have an overwhelming urge to trivialize everything or if it's an American thing? A Western thing? I dunno. I'm leaning toward "it's a human thing" and that Americans have turned it into a fine art. Ernest Hartmann in his book _Dreams and Nightmares: The New Theory on the Origin and Meaning of Dreams_ theorizes that people who've been through a traumatic event often have traumatic nightmares that are similarly painful to the real event, but use completely different imagery. For instance, someone who survived a fire having nightmares about tornados, shipwrecks, drowning. He believes it allows them to integrate the painful event into their psyche. He further theorized that people for whom the aftermath gets more traumatic, rather than less, are not integrating well and require assistance. But just like the sex joke is the easiest to make and therefore people default to it (rather than going for the more difficult but more interesting funny) people overshoot integration and hit trivial. The Academy Awards, fashion upheavals, dramatic events documented in the media (abused children, missing spouses, stars/actors wrestling with themselves, explosions of all sorts)... we want to own each incident, so we grab onto every little detail. And the feeders oblige us. Immediately the mystery is lost, the interesting becomes the trivial, and the trivial becomes important. Things we can't grab onto because they are too complex - the Balkans, the Middle East, racism and the legacy of slavery, the rights of the creator (of music/writing/software) versus the rights of the user - we break down into sides. Good versus evil, right versus wrong, strong economy versus everything. In this way we take the first step to trivialize it, then we argue opinions to try to own it. But these issues change constantly, and we just can't hold onto them. They make us uncomfortable, vaguely or acutely, and we feed that back to the media, the corporations, the government. Eager to score approval, these organizations try to simplify - they play to us at lower reading level, using a less complicated language and complex images which (subtly or blatantly) provoke ideas that they find useful to themselves. And the images - pro-American propaganda like flags waving or stars twinkling, death, sex, deathsex and sexydeath, romantic love, the woman always cleans up, men drink beer, women hate sports, men hate shopping, appearances are important, spontenaity is sexy - sell product or sell lifestyles that require a whole range of products. Productization is another form of trivializing. If you can look like the object of your desire, or like his/her partner, like his/her lifestyle, like an adventurer, like the strong sexy yet sensitive person you REALLY are inside, then you can handle anything. YOU can understand your life and the complexities of this world that challenge those darned egg-heads (who still haven't solved all our problems). Vicious cycles. They piss me off. I am no less prone to them than anyone else. But I do feel the need to try and document them. Thanks for reading.