Friday, September 9
A hypothesis: Killing time on a computer is a special kind of inactivity
tied to the same state of mind as things like watching television and
listening to ad-heavy radio, only with an added component of illusory
utility. It tends to a kind of mock-creative, artificially productive
state, generating constant low-level noise and heat without any real
movement.
Thus we have mindless forwarded e-mail. People standing in public
libraries playing Flash-based clones of Space Invaders and
Frogger. Warez kiddies collecting terabytes of cracked proprietary
software they will never use and movies they don't want to watch. Listless
hours of cycling through blogs, news sites, forums. Carefully tweaked
window managers and desktop themes. Painfully organized filesystem
hierarchies. Small crowds idling on IRC channels where nothing is ever
said. The straightfaced and desperately bored typing "LOL!" over
and over again. Countless thousands of weblogs containing millions of words
of quoted text. Hyperlinking as compulsive tic. After a while it has the
same kind of ambience, calming yet perpetually dissatisfying, as late night
skiffy or a well-produced infomercial. The background hum of a game between
teams you aren't interested in, in a sport you only half understand.
The problem is that while televisions (for example) are useful for
watching things like good movies and bad election coverage, they aren't
especially necessary. Not watching TV was a straightforward transition,
because it happened when I wasn't paying any attention. There wasn't one
around, and I didn't watch it, and when I noticed I realized that I was at
least marginally happier for its absence.
I'm not dogmatic about this. Elizabeth came home with a TV the other
day, and it's sitting on a couple of cinderblocks in the corner waiting for
a VCR or DVD player . I think this is a fine idea. Movies are cool. On the
other hand, I kind of feel like it'd be a tossup between regularly pounding
my head against a brick wall and ever again paying attention to
broadcast/cable/satellite/whatever television.
The computer, meanwhile, still has a hold on me after all this time, I
think because it represents a generally useful toolset. Much as I love
writing on paper, the advantages of a good text editor are overwhelming for
most projects. I've been wanting to take pictures for years, but it
probably never would have happened without a decent digital camera and the
right software. Most of my music lives on one hard drive or another. Trying
to publish poetry
on respectable paper is generally a doomed proposition, best left to English professors
and other more optimistic fools than me, which means that you might as well put
it on the web where half a dozen of your friends & acquaintances might
notice.
Given all this, I'm not entirely sure how to keep this thing from soaking up
too much of my limited concentration in the wrong kind of idleness. I think
it is probably dangerous that our civilization has developed so much
apparatus for filling our various stillnesses and silences.
tags: tv
p1k3 /
2005 /
9 /
9
