I have been displaced. So have you.
A awareness of self requires a awareness of reality, the context that encompasses self. But all who are reading this are dissolving into vaporous half lives of fading reality. Admit it, reality doesn’t matter much anymore. We are now somewhere else, displaced.
A man plays a fictional decision-making executive on a television program and gets elected president of the real United States. People who disliked the TV program dislike the president. People who enjoyed the TV program like the president. Success and failure are no longer definable in any objective criteria. As Nicholas Roeg informed us, it's all Performance.
Living people such as the Queen of England or Dick Cheney have their identities fictionalized and improved – made more entertaining – and we layer this new titillating persona over the old boring one. Our mental acuity becomes blunted, smothered under layers of perception that more or less resemble each other. We don’t care – in fact, we rather enjoy it. Like Martin Guerre upon his return, the alternative realities are more satisfying. They make sense to us because we can always find a narrative that is self-congratulatory ... even as that sense of self becomes more and more elusive. We define selfhood to fit the data, so no matter what happens, we can feel smugly satisfied.
The phone stays ever-present, and the data reality of each person's choosing cascades incessantly. This reality was designed to be addictive, and we now prefer it to the quotidian drizzle outside our windows. Gamers by the tens of millions ride the bus thinking about the next move in Fortnite, not the coming day at work. The world's top internet celebrity is PewDiePie ... but you knew that, right? This gamer-turned-free-form-idiot has the most YouTube subscribers in the world. Do you feel left out? Go find your own community.
We carry our digital restraining bolts with us at all times. We all feel compelled to check our phones to see what we have missed, ignoring the obvious: If we never check our phone, we never miss anything.
Test yourself. How often do you think about digital interaction … the phone, streaming media, the compulsive 30-second news cycle? The answer is hard to accept. Now try to imagine a healthy outcome from this displaced awareness.
Neil Postman was right.
Whenever we look through a family album of old photographs, most of us ask "Who is this?" not "Who was this?" Photographs are always present tense, and so are all the elements of life the enrich us. This blog considers music, film, books and other communications that call out to me always in the present tense.
