In Praise of Voyeurism

At what age do you wake up and become crotchety?

I'm afraid it's happened. In response to my last post, a friend asked whether I thought all these new-fangled machines left nothing to worry about. On the contrary, I think there are tons of problems with these dagnabbed kids and their dagnabbed Tamagotchi-ma-call-ums. It's just that Facebook is not a serious threat. It's so popular, in fact, largely because it imitates the way social interactions were already taking place or being conceived.

(Incidentally, I was glad to see that I wasn't not alone in my grumbling about Zadie Smith's article--bigger, badder responders can be found here, here, and here, some with data to back up what the others argue more deductively and intuitively.)

What really strikes me about the growing popularity of electronic forms of entertainment is how boring they are. They're good for an awkward minute--but how someone can spend longer than a half an hour wandering through landscapes and shooting at things is beyond me. Even the games I remember loving growing up now feel dull--in general, I'd rather read.

I think the problem is interactivity. A gaming culture expects to be able to provide input and to have that input be acknowledged. The problem is that games don't, in their current state, have the virtual robustness to set up interesting possibilities with unpredictable results. It's like one of those Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novels that were popular when I was young: it was exciting to have choice, but the novels never lasted long or went into much complexity, and the choice was necessarily constrained. Every opportunity the reader/player is given to make a real decision uses up informational space that could have been devoted to greater richness or complexity of the world depicted. And those decisions are hardly real--all they're sensitive to is "shoot/don't shoot," "touch object/don't touch object," etc.

It makes me feel like some cantankerous Joad Cressbeckler to say so, but I think that these kinds of interactive entertainment generate a certain set of expectations and a certain skill set in people. People who grow accustomed to them become very good at exploring the strengths and weaknesses of an impoverished set of choices given to them, and they expect their every decision or input to generate an immediate reaction. But they become unable to think of new or more complex options, and impatient with forms of entertainment or information that do not provide room for immediate feedback.

What are the results? People want to express and communicate and exchange messages before they build up enough complex information and ideas to provide significant feedback. A lot of learning takes place in idleness or passivity, when we're accepting information, ideas, and words without responding to them yet, or when we're digesting the information that we have taken in and are evaluating it. The problem, in other words, is not excessive stimulus, but excessive response. There needs to be a lag time, time to evaluate, regroup, and realize what does and doesn't make sense. The idea that technology is robbing us of this kind of time isn't new, but I think it has developmental effects on people in terms of the kind of information and interactions they get used to participating in.

I don't like to think of the solution to this kind of dwindling downtime as reflection. Reflection already seems so purposive: something you do in response to a stimulus. (Spend a couple of minutes reflecting! Then, you'll get to give your feedback!) Idleness is better, because there's a sense of total lack of activity, which is what I'm really talking about. Passive intake, mandatory idleness, and then--if ever--the possibility of some kind of response. Maybe surprisingly, I think the kind of voyeurism associated with Facebook is a step in the right direction--it involves passively absorbing other people's lives without any necessary expectation of interaction. It's different from the Internet more generally; the kind of personhood it encourages is older and more thoughtful. Compare it to, say, blogs, which prioritize speedy stimulus-and-response, both on their own comment threads and in exchanges with each other.

Those're my two cents. Absorb it, don't comment on it--I don't let you, after all--and go be idle somewhere for a while.