Getting bored; situational boredom (30 Dec 2010)

I tend to agree with the adage that there are no boring things, only boring people. I wrote a column a few years ago about boredom, building on Marx's assertion that "the production of too many useful things results in too many useless people." My not especially original point is that culture-industry products engender boredom; they expect it as a precondition in their audiences as prerequisite to being able to please them. We need to achieve boredom first before we can be entertained by, say, NCIS. Boredom, basically, is relative, not an absolute ontological condition. I argued in the column that "just as the more a society produces, the more potential there is for the feeling of scarcity, for perceiving relative scarcity; the more entertainment options there are, the more we become aware of boredom." (That's basically a recasting of economist Staffan Linder's argument in The Harried Leisure Class.) And as social-recommendations crank up, I suspect so will boredom, and guilt over feeling at once overwhelmed with possible diversions and also too utterly indolent to undertake them all in a systematic way. Boredom starts feeling safer than commitment to one thing, since there are so many competing reasons to keep one's attention free for something better that might come along. Thus attention becomes more passive, a languid suitor waiting to be wooed. We stand and wait, bored.

The reason I dredge that up is that the WSJ had a vintage A-hed story yesterday about Boring 2010, a conference in England organized by media-company employee James Ward and devoted, unlike so many other ones, to dull presentations.

Proceedings at the sell-out event were kicked off by Mr. Ward himself, who discussed his tie collection at great length, accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation. He noted that as of June 2010, he owned 55 ties, and 45.5% of them were of a single color. By December, his tie collection had jumped by 36%, although the share of single-color ties fell by 1.5%. "Ties are getting slightly more colorful," he noted. Also, apparently, his taste was improving. By December, only 64% of his ties were polyester, down from 73% in June. Even less stirring was a milk tasting. Ed Ross, an actor, swirled, sniffed and sipped five different milks in wine glasses, commenting on each one's flavor, finish and ideal "food pairing." (Cereals got mentioned a lot.)

It sounds like this was less about boredom than an elaborate parody of self-obsession and connoisseurship, that is, about things we fail to find boring about ourselves that bore everyone else. It sounds pretty hilarious, and I imagine the pressure to keep it all deadpan made it more so. It also seems like more evidence that boredom is situational, relational; it doesn't adhere in subject matter but in relationships. I am almost never bored when alone, probably because I find myself endlessly fascinating but also because I can ricochet between any number of distractions without any negotiation or warning. I don't have to justify what I am preoccupied with in any given moment. The presence of others conjures the boredom of compromise.

Boredom production (6 April 2010)

This PSFK item about social networks ends with a platitude about keeping fickle consumers interested.

The rapid pace of change and relative unpredictability of when consumers’ rapt attention will become boredom is an ongoing challenge for social media players to continually understand their users, lifestyles and consumption habits – and to adapt to keep them engaged.

This reminded me of my most recent essay for Generation Bubble, where I argue that we are continually driven to produce our own boredom. The gist of my piece is that social media lets us function as our own mini ad agencies, working to exhaust the meaning of things more quickly so as to expand the flexibility of our identities, and to make each identity-signifying gesture seem more significant in the moment. Does that make sense? My point is that we want to expend the meaning in a good in a fireworks-like explosion of broadcasted signification; we don't want our goods to continue to signify who we are after the contrived moment of their presentation to our public. As a result, we purposely make ourselves bored with things, and boredom is a state of open, uncommitted possibility for us, whereas ongoing engagement with some specific set of thing is confining.

So there is no way to keep consumers engaged without continually presenting them with novelty -- to repackage the same crap as something new, if necessary. It's not "relatively unpredictable" that consumers will be bored; it's completely predictable, and the pace at which that exhaustion occurs is continually accelerating.

Boredom Production (17 March 2010)

I mentioned earlier that I was reading Suburban Youth in Cultural Crisis a book from 1979 by Ralph Larkin that is derived from a participant-observation study he conducted in an affluent New Jersey high school. He basically "raps" with teens and then lays a heavy Marcusean trip all over them. Frankly I didn't get much out of that section of the book, but I found his theory-driven conclusion very interesting.

I went into the book with a vague sense that the "cultural crisis" that has been more or less ongoing since the 1970s is the fact that the post-scarcity economy can't easily absorb younger generations and provide them with jobs. (Larkin points to "the necessity for education to act as a surplus absorption device.") Thus society has had to find ways of keeping young people occupied, delaying their entry into the workforce or diverting them entirely. Larkin writes:

The governments of the Western nations, at the writing of this book, are busy wringing their hands over what to do with the children of the baby boom in stagnating economies that are increasingly unable to absorb the younger part of the labor force. Yet these children of post-scarcity society do not necessarily want routinized labor. In addition, since they have been brought up in a televised world, they have been repeatedly told that pleasure is something that commodities provide.

Much of that seems to apply today; just replace "in a televised world" with "with the internet."

The early 20th century solution to this problem was world war and mass killing. (We can only hope that the Tea Partyers and their nihilistic ilk won't take us down that road.) After World War II, consumerism evolved as a way to invent new desires, and authorize wasteful consumption under the guise of self-actualization. Identity becomes a never-ending process, rather than a lived-in fact. More recently, we've seen the extension of adolescence, and the evolution of slacker norms to rationalize people in their 20s living with their parents (cf. Buster Bluth). But it seems the post-postmodern solution to this crisis evolving now involves "hipsters on food stamps" and immaterial labor online in social networks and the like. Consumption becomes a form of free labor, and while young people get acclimated to making the art of being themselves into a full-time job, they come to de-stigmatize the receipt of a social wage in the form of food stamps and pirated entertainment.

In Larkin's pre-internet world, there were far fewer opportunities for immaterial labor for youth, only boredom, which is how my generation tended to experience the "cultural crisis." The production of boredom -- depriving people of the resources by which they can get themselves into flow states -- is a key prerequisite to the consumerist solution to the larger issue of what do to with jobless youth. Pervasive boredom sets up the acceptance of novelty as an ideal. Novelty helps take care of the overproduction problem, creating a situation in which redundant consumption becomes normal. But it merely exacerbates boredom by accelerating its onset. Knowledge of immediate alternatives allows boredom to set in faster. (Hence the ADD epidemic.)

How is boredom produced? Larkin has some ideas. Advertising deploys the carrot and stick: it makes goods seem desirable and pleasurable (ads function like drugs in that they mobilize a mode of temporary escape into fantasy), and it instills insecurity about falling behind, or lacking the necessary goods for admittance into acceptable society. And institutions do their part to make social relations seem instrumental. It's normal to be bribed to behave well, and rewards should be materialized as belongings, not as the ongoing experience of well-being. But what I found most interesting in Larkin's account of the production of boredom was his analysis of "packaged experience" and "ersatz success." He develops a long argument based on the example of model airplanes.

Since the process [of building a model airplane from a kit] is reduced to essentially assembling fitted plastic parts and then gluing them, the young person learns nothing of the structure of an airplane while constructing it, only its outer form.

That sounds a lot like a critique of Rock Band, which also denatures a hobby that might have turned into a skill but instead is reduced to escapist distraction. Larkin continues:

By degrading the process by which one can attempt to reconstruct the world, external reality assumes a facile and, at the same time, a mystical quality. Prepackaging allows young people to believe that problem solving is essentially a process of selection the correct combination of alternatives.... The emphasis is altered to focus on quantity rather than on quality. Since the construction of model airplanes has been degraded, advertisers emphasize collections to enhance sales.... Once a hobby or any other endeavor becomes easily quantifiable, it becomes the basis for the accumulation of status and psychological dominance. The degradation of the process of labor teaches the child at an early age to participate in a competitive struggle surrounding commodity consumption.

Digital mediation has only accelerated these processes, making the measurement of the self nearly inescapable, and making the archive the model for the self rather than engaged presence. The present is always shattered by multitasking into fragments, and connectedness promotes a lack of commitment to what is happening in the moment and perpetual fantasizing about the alternatives that are always instantaneously available. ("Boring. Think I'll click off this page to something else. Keep scrolling...")

Larkin sees youth as defeated by the way they are encouraged to be buyers rather than doers. And he ties that into passive consumption of entertainment.

Once a person accepts the superiority of the mystified process of the production over his own abilities, he is reduced to a mechanical entity who chooses among preset alternatives. The same process is revealed in human relations. National talent is continually present on television, i the movies, on recordings and so forth. The disparity between the young person's own rudimentary skills and those of a star may stimulate the emulation of a few, but discourages the many; especially since most young people are aught to desire instant gratification. Contemporary American culture discourages the learning of a discipline, as the average person is reduced to a spectator viewing professionals who are paid for participating in activities which might be intrinsically satisfying to the amateur.

The key question is whether the modes of sharing online alters Larkin's analysis. Does Web 2.0-style participation do anything to change our expectations of instant gratification? Does it offer social rewards for the careful mastery of a particular discipline? Or does it encourage frivolity and narcissism? Does it present an array of choices that we merely click through? Has it diminished the fascination of celebrities as unattainable models?

It's not really an either-or situation, of course, but the tendency does run more one way than the other, I think. The experience of being online has become an amalgam of consumption and production, but it seems more the former than the latter. I'm not sure it has made breaking the habits of boredom and distraction any easier; it seems like it probably reinforces them even as it provides us with all sorts of information and opportunities for engagement and connection.

Nanostories, etc. (31 Aug 2009)

Harper's editor Bill Wasik, the inventor of the purposely pointless internet-driven media event known as a flash mob, has expanded on what that experiment taught him in a book, And Then There's This. Fittingly enough, I finished reading it while I was down the shore, in the land that the internet seems to have forgot. (When they hear wi-fi, many in Wildwood would probably think you are talking about WIFI 92, the top 40 station in Philly circa 1978.) The book is primarily about how the internet encourages the acceleration of our cultural consumption by prompting us -- now no longer passive consumers but media operatives ourselves, fascinated by our own impact and keen to play at being an insider -- to refashion news as "nanostories," microstories whose popularity (measured by internet metrics) peaks quickly and then rapidly dissipates. Whatever real underlying fundamental trends there might be get lost in the noise. Culture accelerates, becomes quicker in its payouts, and becomes more compulsive and addictive. This, as Wasik notes, makes the internet just like a slot machine, whose quick-hitting but apparently random rewards are engineered to make players addicted: "games of chance seem to be more addictive in direct proportion to the rapidity and continuity of their 'action' -- how quickly, that is, a gambler is able to learn the outcome of his wager and then make another." Online, the action is the tracing of trends and our own statistically determined significance. Twittering, and then seeing what sort of response it provokes, etc. We are never at a loss for an opportunity to try to garner attention, and these efforts are archived, deepening our potential self, even if it is all noise. The internet's archiving capacity means there is an excess of the narratives from which we shape our sense of self. "With the Long Tail of Truth, telling ourselves new stories about ourselves has never been easier: abundant, cheap distribution of facts means an abundant, cheap and unlimited variety of narratives, on demand, all the time."

But the internet is not only a machine for generating memes, but also for manufacturing spurious hermeneutics. Wasik contends that we have all become conscious analysts of how media narratives operate (we have the "media mind," as he puts it); the presence of so many independent operators in the media space compresses those narratives, turns them over quickly as we all experiment to see which framing techniques attract the most attention. (Popularity tends to snowball, since popularity is factored in to what choices are given prominence.) The internet has given us means to sell ourselves the way products have long been sold to us, and we've embraced them, adopting advertising measuring tools (the data on popularity the internet makes available to use for our personal pages) as markers of moral value. The potential scope of our reach invalidates previous mores:

When your words or actions or art are available not only to your friends but to potentially thousands or even millions of strangers, it changes what you say, how you act, how you see yourself. You become aware of yourself as a character on a stage, as a public figure with a meaning.

As a result, we manage our public meaning like a brand manager, and perfect the art of culture monitoring -- meta consumption of media. We begin to consume the buzz about buzz, or pure buzz, with no concern with what it's about, only whether we can exploit it for self-promotion.

What's lost in the focus on the meta-story of something's popularity and usefulness for our own carefully monitored identity is obviously the thing itself, which becomes difficult to recognize and consume in traditional ways. Artists are seen as the "instantiation of a trend," and their work is assessed in that regard -- the mythical organic reading is even harder to achieve or even simulate. "Call it the age of the model" Wasik writes. "Our metaanalyses of culture (tipping points, long tails, crossing chasms, ideaviruses) have come to seem mroe relevant and vital than the content of culture itself.... The real vigorish is in learning not about what is cool than learning about how cool works." When all that resonates about a meme or idea is its viral potential, all ideas are ideas about marketing.

This concern with only the momentary impact of any story and its metasignificance decontextualizes them, allows ideas to function as commodities: "The meme vision of culture -- where ideas compete for brain space, unburdened by history or context -- really resembles nothing so much as an economist's dream of the free market. We are asked to admire the marvelous theoretical efficiencies (no barriers to entry, unfettered competition, persistence of the fittest) but to ignore the factual inequalities." In other words, nanostories, not surprisingly, preserve the status quo, reinforcing our own vanity and self-centeredness along with the market as timeless, unquestionable norm.

Wasik takes a look at the decisive role of boredom. We are not inherently disposed to be bored -- Wasik cites research that suggests boredom is a defense mechanism that we invoke when we are confronted with too many choices. But those choices are what capitalism offers us as proof of our purchasing power as consumers. So we experience boredom as proof of our centrality in the consumerist cosmos, and this boredom is a deliberate achievement of the existing social order -- it fixates us on novelty as a value, and drives us to consume habitually, for ideological rather than material fulfillment. It's pretty self-evident, I guess -- boredom is a product of awareness of choice, and the advertising infrastructure does nothing but make us aware of choices. Wasik argues that the ubiquitous boredom helps drives the acceleration of media consumption by fostering backlashes on schedule; I would only add that the boredom is market-driven -- the oversupply of ideas and goods are stimulating the demand adequate to them, changing the attitudes and self-concepts of consumers in the process.

So the market imposes the possibility of novelty on everyday life, which engenders boredom, the feeling of being hopelessly overwhelmed by choice and the drift into aimless lassitude. In this state we are unwilling to commit to anything deeply -- it might grow boring -- so we invest our time and effort on into shallow things that are quickly disposed of, or the most convenient experiences, things which are by their nature not very satisfying. So we become temperamentally insatiable.

In the final chapter, Wasik suggests strategies for fighting the acceleration and compression of cultural consumption: one is rationing our information supply and adopting a renunciative attitude toward the internet. Just say no. Another is time-shifting -- "delaying one's experience of a cultural product long enough that any hype or buzz surrounding it has dissipated." That is something I wholeheartedly endorse and practice: I am currently watching the second season of Dallas -- and loving it. I don't know that it helps anything though. I needed there to be buzz before to even think of watching it now. Ultimately Wasik has no answers -- we must strike a balance, he suggests in Aristotalian fashion, but gives no sense of what that might be. We must choose "judiciously" what information we consume, but offers no criteria for this. He advocates "sustainable approaches to information" but little sense of what that would entail. Like Žižek argues, it is easier to imagine the end of the world -- the destruction of the internet by some super virus or something -- than to imagine a way to consume it temperately.

Infinite Flameout (28 July 2009)

I really wanted to get with the zeitgeist and read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest this summer. But at page 236, in the middle of a unparagraphed stream-of-consciousness passage about a melodramatically veiled woman smoking crack with an improvised works, I couldn't take it anymore. I may be a victim of our short-attention-span society -- and part of why I wanted to read the long, long, novel is that it seemed to run counter to our growing preference for "the short, the sweet, and the bitty," as Tyler Cowen says -- but I kept feeling I was expending a lot of effort on the book with virtually no reward.

It's not that I don't read long books -- I'll happily plod along through Trollope's triple deckers, and in graduate school I worked mainly on the novels of Samuel Richardson, whose Clarissa clocks in at 1,500 pages in the Penguin edition. I just don't have patience for long, incoherent books. Infinite Jest seemed like pointless jigsaw puzzle; unlike Pynchon's books, in which there seems to be so much interconnection between the various threads and so many resonating levels of meaning criss-crossing through the text that it's almost overwhelming but always compelling you to work at holding it together in your mind, Wallace's book just seems to dump a bunch of confusing stuff in your lap and hope that you are too disoriented to recognize that it's not interesting. I kept wishing I was reading the Cliffs Notes version of Infinite Jest that put the action in the right order and explained what all the stupid abbreviations stood for. It didn't help that the novel is preoccupied with several things I just have little interest in reading about: high-school tennis, boarding schools, the self-defeating behavior of drug addicts, the city of Boston -- it sounds dumb, I'm sure, but I would have kept reading a little longer if it was set in Philadelphia.

Maybe I needed to follow Samuel Johnson's advice regarding Richardson: "If you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment, and consider the story as only giving occasion to the sentiment." I know the plot is sort of beside the point with Infinite Jest and that wanting to have it explained is just a way of seeking the satisfying sense of an ending when the thematic closure feels elusive, requiring far more effort and patience. Still, though immersing oneself in the texture of Infinite Jest must be the appeal, but I found it off-putting to get into the finer nuances of smart, analytical people destroying themselves.

Wallace's periphrastic style, so effective in his essays, when it helps him establish a particular attitude toward his material and drives him to uncover minutia that pays surprising dividends, was totally infuriating in a novel, when the often arbitrarily dense detailing was just more crap he was making up and more stuff I was supposed to work hard to figure out because he was tauntingly withholding the explanation from me. I found myself growing extremely resentful about that, and it seemed ridiculous to be mad at a book when I could just put it down and read something else. It reminded me, too, of Wes Anderson's later movies, overloaded with detail yet at the same time claustrophobically fastidious and self-referential, precious -- gifted people obsessing over the pressures of being recognized as gifted; all the advantages of talent reduced to morbid sensitivity.

His tendency to overwrite reminded me of when I used to write college papers on a typewriter back in the 1980s. It was hard to delete anything that didn't work out once you typed it into the body of the paper, so I would generally try to write myself out of corners I'd found I'd backed myself into. Wallace is at his worst when this seeming can't-revise/won't-revise approach is combined with pretentious and showy vocabulary, awkward sentence structures (derived perhaps from spending too much time analyzing grammar) and a stream-of-consciousness structure which meanders and turns in on itself. (Who likes stream-of-consciousness? Is there anything more tiresome than an unedited regurgitation of someone else's thoughts?) I didn't think it was especially funny either, despite trying very hard to get in the spirit of the thing. It was too much like gallows humor, and Wallace's suicide, unfortunately, hangs over the book like a pall.

Still, I wish I could find the book readable. Crammed with failed people and their failed strategies for dealing with the strain of social reality, the book succeeded in making me feel like a failure. Thanks for that.

Speed eating (6 May 2009)

More collateral damage from the acceleration and disintegration of social life: At Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok links to this Economix post at the NYT site about the relationship between obesity and the time spent eating. This chart tells the story of their possible correlation:

I would assume that this reflects how eating remains more of a social ritual in some cultures rather than a solo refueling mission, as it frequently is in the U.S. It reminds me of my experience in Europe, where I found to my chagrin that the idea of getting coffee to go is practically unheard of. In New York, in my neighborhood, the Greek immigrants sit at the cafes all day and I can't even figure out what could be keeping them there. I find, sadly, that I relate more to the people I see shoving a slice of pizza into their mouths while walking through crowds in Midtown.

But our feeling of perpetually not having enough time seems to rationalize such behavior. Eating quickly, which almost automatically means eating alone, seems a consequence of the enormous pressure we feel to be moving on, consuming more, shrinking the base unit in which we measure the attention we pay so that we have more of it to spend. This need to economize attention (where does this need come from? can it be resisted?) encourages to isolate ourselves so that we may have complete control over our "experience economy". It also prompts us to gird ourselves with gadgetry so that we may streamline our cultural throughput.

Perhaps since Vance Packard and his ilk first made a sensationalized stink about planned obsolescence in the 1960s, it has seemed inherently subversive to slow down or prolong our consumption time. But the time we spent consuming something doesn't seem to be something we can set out to control; it instead seems a byproduct of our engagement with the thing in question, which makes it an insidious target for manipulation. The result is that conscious efforts to slow ourselves down may make us feel intolerably bored with ourselves.

Outsourced motivation (20 March 2009)

At the Atlantic's website, Reihan Salam files a report on the tech companies debuting projects at South by Southwest, which has apparently transformed itself into a milieu for venture capitalists rather than A&R men. (Related question: In our iSociety, has music become subsumed under technology?) Salam highlights the proliferation of services that attempt to transform everyday life tasks into games by assign values to them and keeping score. He describes Loudcrowd, which serves up social games to isolated people, commercializing our reluctance to be out in the world where we can't control everything. Channeling Allen Bloom, Salam writes that Loudcrowd suggests to him "anomic dystopia" -- I guess I'd define it as a world in which collective experience is systematically abrogated, a world in which only competition can "unite" us and corporations reap the profits from our combat. We end up sharing only the ideal of measured achievement: how many more points we can score, how many people are reading our updates, how many more things we can own or add to our list of experiences. Services like Loudcrowd seem to meet the need we now have to have our social experiences more rigidly structured by an outside party, a referee, some sort of mediator. Increasingly, simply hanging out seems like wasted time unless someone is keeping score or is broadcasting it to others who are not there.

We seem to have worked ourselves into a corner where we must outsource our ability to be motivated. We need outside parties to generate motivational schemes and point systems to drive us through life activities that were once rewarding enough in and of themselves. As Salam notes, It's easy to imagine this evolving into a social engineering system in which we are told what we should enjoy by virtue of how many points some commercially interested party has assigned it. But where he points out that "this concept of layering games over real life is an extension of something we all do: apply our own standards and expectations to the social world," he fails to note that these services are endeavoring to perform that function for us, pre-empt our own standards while substituting their own.

Meeting with your friends too boring? Social life too uncompetitive for you? Enter Foursquare, "an ingenious service that turns finding your friends into a Zelda-like quest," according to Salam. He quotes this description of the service from the NYT:

Foursquare players "check in" via iPhone application, text message or the Web. That alerts their network of friends to their current location, in case they feel like dropping by to say hello or have a drink. (If you're flying solo, or on a date, Foursquare allows you to check in without posting your location.) Players rack up points for checking in at unusual places, early hours of the morning or in the same location as other users in their network.

It seems strange that we would need to incentivize ourselves to have a social life, but that seems the inevitable outcome of technology-assisted convenience. Convenience tends to be a matter of avoiding interpersonal hassles in favor of a solipsistic world in which we have individual control over as much details of our experience as possible. The ideal, from the perspective of technology, would be a situation in which we don't have negotiate any aspects of shared space or time with anyone. "Sharing" itself would become passe. (Where's the incentive?) Instead, we broadcast at one another from our hermetic worlds. Why trouble yourself with reciprocity when you have the tools to broadcast yourself to those who happen to be interested, and filter out what bores you among everyone else's broadcasts.

Drawing on Will Wilkinson's argument about the proliferation of coexisting status hierarchies making us all feel like achievers (as if these are not themseleves ordered into a hierarchy), Salam suggests that these virtual games mapped on real life are useful because they "introduce new hierarchies designed to make life more fulfilling and fun at a faster rate than we've seen in the past." Generally, that seems like a grim take on human nature, that it requires hierarchies for their to be fulfillment and fun -- that winning is the only joy we know. But stranger, especially for a conservative like Salam, is how he posits acceleration as basically beneficial. This seems to me another of technology's detrimental effects, given our consumer society -- tech is tailored for increasing our cultural consumption throughput. Making social life into a game, quantifying it even more precisely, seems very likely to exacerbate that tendency, nullifying the quality of experience and reducing it to a point value. ("I wanted to see that painting show at the Met, but I saw that the Guggenheim was worth more so I went there instead." "Would have went to see your band, but seeing the band playing at Mercury Lounge was worth more points. Sorry.")

Trying to avoid distraction (12 Jan 2009)

Nicholas Carr, building from my post about dilettantism and incorporating an analysis of the Clash's "Complete Control" to boot, draws this pertinent conclusion: "Distraction is the permanent end state of the perfected consumer, not least because distraction is a state that is eminently programmable."

That seems right to me. The implication is that the level of our interest in our amusements, and worse, in what we may consider to be our life's work, has its limits set by the sort of society we live in -- the tendency to become distracted is not some personal failing or the indicator of someone's weak will, but the accomplishment of a bundle of associated forces that help naturalize certain consumerist preferences. Our susceptibility to boredom is "programmable" through the amount of stuff thrown at us and the amount of stuff a "normal" with-it person is assumed to know about and the various ways cultural ignorance can be exposed. (Hence the useless entertainment quizzes and trivia contests and the like. These seem innocuous enough, but they help calibrate our boredom, suggesting what the breadth and depth of our knowledge should be.) Fortunately, we are not yet "perfected" consumers in this fashion, but -- if you'll forgive a lapse into teleology -- that's the goal a consumerist economy hopes to accomplish. That trend is palpable (though perhaps that is because those resisting it do not register, have no way of communicating their resistance to a hypermediated and hyperaccelerated society without acceding to its terms). If we are not vigilant, our attention span will continue to shrink, and the "helpful" tools to force more and more material through that tiny pinhole of focus will proliferate. (Just as road-building worsens traffic problems, media-management and organization tools tend to exacerbate our attention problems. I spend as much time editing metadata as I do concentrating on music I'm listening to.)

Impelled by a sense that we must streamline our consumption and absorption of information and experiential opportunity (a need fomented by media technology, which both extends marketing's reach and expands the amount of information we can readily acquire), we end up going for quantity over quality, the superficial over the complex, and regard convenience as an abstract good rather than being defined in relation to some other activity. Convenience only speeds our pursuit of more convenience. In this, we come to resemble our society's economic system, which seeks profit for its own sake. To keep up the incidental Marx references: in The Limits to Capital David Harvey points to this relevant passage in Capital:

The simple circulation of commodities - selling in order to buy - is a means of carrying out a purpose unconnected with circulation, namely, the appropriation of use-values, the satisfaction of wants. The circulation of money as capital is, on the contrary, an end in itself, for the expansion of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The circulation of capital has therefore no limits.
As the conscious representative of this movement, the possessor of money becomes a capitalist. His person, or rather his pocket, is the point from which the money starts and to which it returns. The expansion of value...becomes his subjective aim, and it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more and more wealth in the abstract becomes the sole motive of his operations, that he functions as a capitalist, that is, as capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will. Use-values must therefore never be looked upon as the real aim of the capitalist; neither must the profit on any single transaction. The restless never-ending process of profit-making alone is what he aims at.

Basically, the economic roles we fulfill -- for most of us, that means "consumer" -- shape the horizon of our subjective aims while serving the underlying function of reproducing the existing system. That means embodying the restless pursuit of novelty, at least to the degree to which we want to be at harmony with the culture we live in. We become consumerism "personified and endowed with a consciousness and a will."

As a result, it's hard to avoid the feeling of missing out on something, no matter how into whatever it is we actually are doing. Alternatives are always filtering in to taunt and tempt us, and we hold our ability to become absorbed, to achieve "flow," in abeyance, waiting for the diversion.

The urge to devise a scorekeeping system for our consumption grows as we seek a way to manage it all and compare what we've done to some standard -- to restore the meaning that's lost with our failure to become absorbed and committed to something. So if there is no way to keep score, then the activity can seem pointless. (A commenter to my previous post made that point about Guitar Hero, adding that this aligns our personal pleasure seeking with corporate notions of total quality management. If there were only some way I could attach some kind of scoreboard to my guitar when practicing scales, maybe I would do it more.) For example, I start to fetishize the number of posts I plow through in a day in my RSS reader; if the unread posts figure reaches 500, I go into orange alert, and start reading faster, skimming more, leaping past the longish posts and the Vox.eu papers and such for BoingBoing and Metafilter links.

Consequently, we end up having to set up defenses against distraction. Writer Cory Doctorow, a BoingBoing.net contributor, offers this compendium of advice for getting writing done. The advice all seems sound if not ultimately somewhat tautological -- the best way to avoid distraction is to not allow yourself to be distracted by bells and whistles on word processors or by instant messaging or the infinite research possibilities online. Such resistance makes sense if we can muster it, but it can feel bad, like stifled curiosity. The problem is that in our culture, curiosity has been co-opted, inverted, made to function as its opposite -- distraction, novelty for its own sake. The growing burden on us is to enforce rigor on our curiosity or exercise the discipline to ignore the would-be forbidden fruit.

Boredom as character flaw (7 Jan 2008)

This article from Scientific American suggests something that I've often suspected, that boredom is less a matter of dull circumstances than of unimaginative people.

a new generation of scientists is grappling with the psychological underpinnings of this most tedious of human emotions—and they have found that it is more complicated than is commonly known. Researchers say that boredom is not a unified concept but rather comes in several flavors. Level of attention, an aspect of conscious awareness, plays an important role in boredom, such that improving a person’s ability to focus may therefore decrease ennui. Emotional factors can also contribute to boredom. People who are inept at understanding their feelings and those who become sucked in and distracted by their moods are more easily bored, for example.

In the past, I've argued that consumerism as a system induces people to become more prone to boredom by encouraging them to feel entitled to convenience and hence exist in a state of perpetual impatience, which is quite like boredom. People come to regard their own experience as disposable, something to be hurried through. At the time, I didn't know about the Boredom Proneness Scale, developed by two psychologists, or what its application has found in terms of whether people are getting more or less bored as society becomes more saturated with commodified culture. But the researchers who created the scale have identified two main characteristics of those easily bored that fit well with my theory: Boredom stems, in their account, from a need for novelty and an inability to generate their own stimulation: In other words, they have become passive consumers who wait to be entertained by some new external stimulus as rapidly as possible. These in turn derive from a short attention span. The question then is whether consuming culture designed for people with short attention spans can actually produce a short attention span. Or is A.D.D. not something our environment has inflicted on us.

This point of view gives a new cast to a meme that already sounds creepy and ominous -- the onset of the "attention economy." It feels as though we have less and less attention to give, as our surroundings become hypermediated, and worse, the scarcity of attention reinforces itself. Attention ceases to be a renewable resource.

Playing chess against a computer (14 June 2007)

I'm hesitant to write about this subject because I suspect I've written about it before, and I have no new insights into it, but perhaps that's appropriate -- indicative of the rut I feel I am in with playing chess against my computer. Every few months this happens: I begin playing chess as a way to procrastinate between various tasks I need to complete in front of my computer. But rather than take on a human opponent on Yahoo or something, I prefer to play the computer, which strikes me as more convenient, more suitable to the aim of taking a brief time out. The initial presumption is that my ego won't get invested since I am not really matching wits with anything. But then, naturally, because I am only half concentrating, the computer takes me apart in humiliating fashion, no matter how artificially dumb of a challenger I select (Chessmaster comes equipped with several hundred fake opponents who have names like Kricek and Lacey and who are designed to play poorly to give amateurs a chance to taste victory). This then infuriates me, and I need to continue to play until I win a few matches and elevate my rating, which the program tracks on a graph and which I spend an embarrassing amount of time looking at, as if it graphed something significant, as if I had some kind of public chess career that the chart has archived. In reality, it records the shocking amount of time I have wasted sheltering myself from other people and my work. It's pretty pathetic, but it becomes compulsive, and I play game after game in a subdued rage, learning nothing new about chess (despite the rationalization that playing chess to unwind is somehow edifying, superior to solving sudoku puzzles or playing Minesweeper), barely even thinking, just trying to to win as fast as possible. Sometimes I'll even ask the computer for hints and then pretend to myself that I was able to beat it and try to revel in that.

What inevitably ends up bothering me is the way the computer opponent becomes anthropomorphized, becoming a kind of tormentor, yet I prefer this figment to a real human challenger, who will likely give me a game that resembles real chess and will reward my concentration. But I'm not looking to concentrate; I'm choosing the worst possible medium -- chess playing -- to avoid concentration. I should perhaps resume playing Freecell or something.

It seems inevitable that I will not only be able to avoid the "inconvenience" of a human opponent in chess but could avoid the trouble of a human partner for all forms of social activity, that I could exist in a pseudo-social universe with programmed frustrations that I can be assured of eventually overcoming (through persistence or hints or maybe cheat codes) replacing the real frustrations of understanding other people.

Worse than the failure to concentrate or relax, though, is this sense that I am becoming as machine like as my opponent, stuck in a repetitive cycle that Chessmaster seems to be programming me for: mechanically moving pieces around, deriving no real pleasure from the exercise but feeling compelled to do it anyway, wanting above all no interruption from human beings and all their spontaneity, which begins to seem supremely inconvenient. The convenience of the computer opponent, and my becoming an automaton-in-training, seems emblematic of the ultimate course of convenience as an ethic (and of mediating social behavior through computers) -- to program oneself with compulsive habits, killing time while avoiding human contact, basically draining life out of oneself. After all, the end goal of all convenience is a supreme thoughtlessness, a structuring of one's life where every next move is predicted, where there is no possibility to contemplate meaningful or challenging choices, which are systematically nullified, where the institutional nature of existence becomes like a computer that's moving the pieces for you but you feel as though you can take credit for the victory nonetheless.

The ecstasy of boredom (19 May 2007)

Having previously offered a theory of boredom I read this post by blogger A White Bear with great relish. AWB claims to love boring art and cites slow and spare Antonioni films as examples of what she is talking about. I usually think of boredom as a character flaw, as a quality in the subject rather than the object, a kind of impatience with reticent, lulling things. But AWB suggests an aesthetics of boredom that hinges on a lack of "narrative necessity." So-called boring things don't provide that ready path for one's mind to rush down, instead they perplex and retard the imagination, force the mind back on itself and make it do a lot more work to remain engaged. Boredom opens up a space for languid speculation, for productive frustration, for conceiving several concurrent hypotheses about what the hell the point is. Works that supply "excitement" often close off the speculative space, hurrying consumers along to largely predictable outcomes that nevertheless are experienced as suspenseful. No one doubts that the killer will be killed in a film like, say, Disturbia,yet nonetheless this pass as suspense. Something truly unpredictable -- Antonioni's L'Avventura, for example -- can often seem boring in its aimless meandering. Boredom, then, stems from the absence of familiar genre conventions or recognizable rhythms.

AWB argues that the suspended nature of boring works gives them an erotic quality -- the jouissance of the endlessly deferred climax transferred to a text that denies closure, that refuses to put forward a organizing principle that allows you to put everything in place. The unstructured material forces you to contemplate it for its own sake, in the moment, and that inspires a sensuality that comes to the surface when we starve the rational, puzzle-solving side of our brains. AWB sees this as a minor pleasure, dubbing it masturbatory -- "satisfying without satiating."

I don't think I would describe masturbation that way. But is it true that details become more erotic as they become more arbitrary? In another post, AWB defines pornography in a similar way, as "a rhetorical mode" that lulls readers into vicariousness with its repetition and details for details' sake. The danger of vicarious experience -- what makes pornography immoral in AWB's view -- is that it supplants a reader's direct experience of the world with texts, simulations. Here, I become skeptical, as I'm not sure how you distinguish authentic experience from simulated experience in our recursive world of late-capitalist consumerism. Most of our experience is already mediated, already in a sense secondhand, vicarious. Thus vicarious experience is virtually indistinguishable from lived experience, which if we encountered it, we'd probably reject as "boring" since it comes free of an interpretation, free from having been slotted into some pseudo-glamorous niche after having being represented elsewhere as entertainment, as worthy of rapt attention.

I would argue that the vicarious experience from texts prepares us to conceive and process our lived experience in certain prepackaged ways -- it makes our own experience legible to ourselves, give it forms that are amenable to being stored as memories. Vicarious experience through entertainment also reinforces patterns of emotional satisfaction serviced by consumerism. I would define the pornographic not in terms of its arbitrarity but its instrumentality, how it facilitates the most convenient route to a precisely delimited goal. It makes emotional responses rote in a way that pleases us, the same way genre conventions keep us from being bored. Porn is sort of the ur-genre, I think, not a suspension of narrativity. It does aspire to a transparency that effaces textuality -- the formal qualities and the careful word choices and the other things that make us pay attention to the medium itself; boring things force us to contemplate the nature of the medium, halting mediation.

I completely agree that consumers prefer what AWB calls the rhetorically pornographic because it protects us from the messiness of actual experience, which involves other people. (I make the porn=convenience argument here.)

I don’t want to moralize here about these aesthetic aspects of pornography, although a great deal of my dissertation is about the social and political issues that arise when readers begin to confuse texts for experience, and to privilege fictional characters’ experiences over their own, which partly happens because of the near-pornographic rhetorical nature of scenes, for example, in Pamela. But what is obvious, over the past three hundred years of mass print culture, and then mass art, music, and film cultures, is that the public always craves the rhetorically pornographic, especially when it does not explicitly offend a prudish sexual sensibility.

There is a fine line, in fact, that “pop” tends to walk now, between providing the pretense of an unmediated experience of something sensory and representing actual sex. My very prim, religious students are reduced to puddles by passages like the one from Dracula above, which gives them something almost like an experience without any of the messy complications of consequences or interpersonal relations, which is why, I think, they place such an outlandish value on their ability to experience along with every text.... What bothers me most is that they seem not to know the difference between reading and doing anymore.

I don't think rhetorical porn -- material that invites vicarious absorption -- promises unmediated experience; I think it promises the pleasures of the precisely mediated. The transcendence (being above the action, it having been designed for you) compensates for the apparent passivity of vicariousness -- whether or not the interpretative effort is passive, whether it is not a kind of activity to suspend disbelief and let yourself be absorbed by a text, is a different question. (This question reminds me that I should probably re-read Michael Fried's Absorption and Theatricality.) This doesn't efface the personality of the reader so much as remove it from the field of play, where it can take on the illusion of completeness, of being untouchable, of not being altered by experience.

Our relations with texts (be they films, books, crap bought at the mall or whatever) have the potential not so much replace our experience of reality, of other people, but format it so that it becomes instrumentalized. Reading and doing become the same thing, and not merely because so much of social existence is about interpreting signals and signs. Rather, the reader/doer presumes himself to be at the center of his own drama, with everything occurring around him seeming to have been designed solely for his amusement. This has the effect of granting identity to the reader, when seductive texts call out for one's attention, interpolating the reader as an individuated subject, as Althusser argues in his essay about ISAs. The protagonists in pornographic literature may become interchangeable, but in so becoming they protect the reader from the fate of anonymity; the reader becomes the stable center around which the dance of anonymous entities and the highly detailed sensations recorded through them are choreographed.

(Hence compulsive self-revelation on the internet as a means to extend self-dramatization; a new tool to further a goal as old as print. Incidentally, my big research topic when I was a graduate student was about how vicarious experience was developed and systematically commercialized in 18th century novels. AWB's dissertation sounds like one I would want to read, especially if it is as well-written as her blog is.) The way our entertainment patronizes us prepares us for life in this hermetic bubble. When entertainment bores us, that's because it is forcing us outside of that bubble. (Porn is never boring in this sense; when clicking through channels randomly, while marooned in a hotel maybe, I never fail to pause when I hit porn; it's compelling as the most concentrated form of mediation, perhaps -- the most instrumental of entertainments, which all aspire to manipulate us with ease.) All that to say that I think what AWB is noticing in her students is the expectation that life itself shouldn't ever transcend the level of vicarious experience, that life should never be anything more than entertaining.

Visual pollution (20 April 2007)

Via Kottke.org comes this link to an International Herald Tribune story about the ban on outdoor advertising in São Paulo. I don't have much sympathy for this line of protest against this:

"This is a radical law that damages the rules of a market economy and respect for the rule of law," said Marcel Solimeo, chief economist of the Commercial Association of São Paulo, which has 32,000 members. "We live in a consumer society and the essence of capitalism is the availability of information about products."

Billboards aren't about distributing information; they are about reshaping the limits on our thought, so that it includes the advertised product at the expense of what we might learn were we left to our own fact-finding ability.

It's a bit embarrassing to admit, but I'm a bit sympathetic to this:

"I think this city is going to become a sadder, duller place," said Dalton Silvano, who cast the sole dissenting vote and is in the advertising business. "Advertising is both an art form and, when you're in your car or alone on foot, a form of entertainment that helps relieve solitude and boredom."

My sympathy makes me wonder if my culture has brainwashed me, and whether that makes laws such as São Paulo's that much more necessary, as much as the paternalism and free-speech implications of it bother me. Should public space remain blank to remain neutral, to remain a public good to the entire public? Or is the brokered colonization of that space adding value to all as well as creating an industry that keeps people employed and others consuming?

Sometimes, in the most feverish moments of my antiadvertising fervor I would dare to dream about such a ban but found it quite impossible to imagine it, in part because as a child growing up in a sleepy semi-rural part of Pennsylvania, I craved much more visual stimulation in the public sphere and was drawn to what seemed to me the de facto excitement of neon. This signified to me the hustle and bustle of commerce, which I had naturally come to think was the essence of "real" life. Nature? Yawn. Reality, as far as I was concerned (though it's not like I was consciously conceiving a philosophical position about it) was the process of exchange, and all the emotions that process inspired. Sometimes I want to blame American culture for instilling this impression in me, but I find I still can't quite shake it. I still get awfully nervous when I find myself "stranded" in the countryside. (In Mediated Thomas De Zengotita has a good passage relating the unnerving quiescence of finding oneself free of media blare, how one can feel strangely orphaned.)

That feeling led me to live in Las Vegas for several years in an attempt to surfeit myself on neon, and on the abstract notion of "action," both visual and propositional. It almost worked. Las Vegas seemed like a blank slate invigorated by huckster energy that manifested as flashy come-ons and temptations, but that impression is part of what the town's vested interests worked to create, the retrospective illusion that there was nothing until they came. But by the time I left there I had grown to have a newfound ardor for "emptiness," for the grandeur of the high sierras, for Death Valley, for the miles of desert surrounding roads that seem endless, roads so featureless that drivers routinely end up in accidents out of boredom. Now, I feel both repulsed and attracted to visual noise and the way it can alter our consciousness and our priorities, the way it signals a falsely triumphant subjugation of nature by humankind. But I wonder whether to live in a place where billboards were taken down but their infrastructure remained would feel like living in an urban ruin, in a dead space where vitality had drained away. How long and how much commitment would it take to eventually dispel that feeling?

Perilous productivity (6 April 2007)

When drops in productivity (the measure of how much you get out of what inputs are put into production) are reported in the media, usually the stern, glum assessment reads something like what's found in this piece from last weekend's WSJ by Greg Ip:

The U.S. productivity boom that began in the mid-1990s is showing signs of running out of steam. If it proves more than a temporary lull, slower growth in productivity -- that is, output per hour worked -- could lead to slower growth in living standards, more difficultly paying for the baby boomers' retirements and a greater risk of inflation. Inflation fears would make the Federal Reserve more reluctant to lower interest rates.

This conforms to the conventional view of economists and is essentially a matter beyond argument, something built in to the very definitions and analytical tools of the profession. No one roots for less productivity any more than they seek to pay more to get less, or buy high and sell low.

Some gains in productivity come from technology -- the 1990s saw the implementation of computerized networks for communication, logistics, inventory control and data processing, and this obviously allowed workers to become far more productive than they had been, despite the endless distractions the internet spawned as byproduct. The productivity boost of having Internet access in offices yields the free time workers can waste reading blogs and watching awesome videos on YouTube like this one. But ultimately, productivity increases come from the sweat of workers' brows, as this post serves to remind us:

Take poor productivity, for instance. The very tone of the phrase, “poor productivity,” strikes me as negative spin. When was the last time you got a new job? How much did your new employer pay you? Most companies want to pay their employees the least amount of money they’re willing to work for. This isn’t because those companies are devious cheapskates; it’s just the basic idea behind having employees.
Poor productivity is the same thing in reverse. Employees are extracting the most amount of money from the least amount of work. This is a bad thing? Why? The time and energy you save just from being inefficient are like money in the bank. After all, time is money. Wise employees turn a profit by paying themselves in time.

This echoes the ideas about workplace tactics that sociologist Michel de Certeau recounts in The Practice of Everyday Life -- workers make the best of an exploitative arrangement by staging invisible slowdowns, stealing supplies, loafing, using company time for personal projects, taking sick days for vacation, and so on. One might argue that these abuses are expected, built into the unspoken employer-employee contract to vent pressure that might otherwise build up as company profits mount while wages remain stagnant. The relation of productivity to wages evokes the question of what purpose management serves: It often seems that management's job is to maximize productivity while disguising the wage discrepancy -- in fact management's productivity would seemingly be defined by the extent of that discrepancy.

The productivity slowdown makes me somewhat skeptical of pieces such as this one from the Guardian, which frets about workplace boredom.

"Boredom is a protest when the job doesn't seem part of who you feel you are," says Rob Briner, professor of organisational psychology at Birkbeck, University of London. "You feel negative about the organisation and lack job satisfaction. It is a risk when you are not being told what your job means."

Read between the lines of that, though, and you come away with the fact that often boredom is a choice, not an imposed condition, a product of unreasonable expectations about the nature of institutionalized work. You expect to define yourself through your job, but then also wait for the manager to supply the definitions. By changing the rules or hiding the logic behind various tasks, managers are just carrying out their mission of masking the true value of anyone's contribution and suppressing disruptive individuality. Any efforts at making work meaningful cannot be imposed from without, by someone higher up in the hierarchy.

Induced alexithymia (5 Feb 2007)

The BPS Research Digest reports on a study about boredom whose findings make a kind of intuitive sense to me. Researchers issued questionnaires to students and found that those "who said they suffered from more boredom also tended to report difficulty identifying their emotions and being externally focused." The researchers somewhat poetically explain the problems of looking to external stimuli to cure boredom: “Like the trap of quicksand, such thrashing only serves to strengthen the grip of boredom by further alienating us from our desire and passion, which provide compass points for satisfying engagement with life.” Looking for distractions only yields further distraction, more boredom. The psychology of this strikes me as correct, and I have argued before that consumer societies have to manufacture this state in its populace. Boredom has to be built in to consumer society's products, and its discourse needs to continually reinforce the notion that we owe it to ourselves to be bored, lest we recognize the resources we have within ourselves. Boredom is a learned habit, not an accident of circumstances. Here's what I wrote about it then:

Since we're trained from childhood not to value the luxury of free thought, and since all initiative to think for ourselves and all cultural validation for autodidacticism has been effaced from the working world, we experience this erstwhile freedom to think undirected thoughts as boredom, as sullen blankness. Given this dire scenario, the culture industry's primary function becomes one of habituating workers to their fate: to routinely expect boredom and to see the oscillation in and out of states of boredom as the only kind of joy. So accordingly, mass entertainments, with their interchangeable stories and their quick-cut edits and their rejection of complexity, carefully cultivate the short-attention span, continuing the cultural work initiated at the multiplex during the children's movie. Concentration is counterproductive in a consumer, whereas boredom suits the consumer economy: incapable of forming deep attachments to cultural commodities and spurred by sublimated class envy, shoppers become perpetually restless for novelty, making serial purchases with spiraling frequency until the ever more tenacious habit of boredom renders them instantaneously empty upon possession. At that point, the act of acquisition is the only moment of pleasure, and one's life becomes a perpetual buying spree.

How then do we get in touch with our emotions if consumer society conspires against us to induce alexithymia? Having recently seen David Lynch field questions about his TM practices and lulled by his repeated allusions to the ocean of bliss within, I wonder if meditation could form a bulwark against the hedonistic materialism's snares, keeping us in a state of pristine emotional biofeedback. I don't know. Meditation seems kind of boring.