simultaneity

May 03, 2006

I'm sorry. You're all going to have to leave now.

_________________________________________________________________________

“…we all want to be something. we all want to be something clever. we all want to do something. for immediacy. for rectification. for reciprocation and disinfection. it’s like fashion…it’s pure sex… ACCOMPLISHMENT: the invention of OURSELVES that allows OURSELVES to do things to be happy. YES. I AM. like language. we are all infinitely removed from every thing. every one. and more so, from ourselves. we live life so that we can self-gratify and we self-gratify so that we can create a system of living.”
-BigPictureGroup Dependent Study
_________________________________________________________________________

Life. We made it up. Collectively. Society. The largest, longest, ongoing user testing cycle ever. If a donkey is a horse designed by committee, then our society is a rhizome
designed by the dependency and inevitability committee. There’s no getting around it – no matter what you do, you are a participant in this. Life. You. An active contributor.

You there - sitting on the couch convincing yourself that tomorrow you’re going to start jogging everyday - perpetuating the cycle of self-loathing regarding the consistent inert state of your own body – you are an active participant. (Yes you are!)

You and everyone you know and everyone you don’t know affect your immediate surroundings at every possible moment. Your affected surroundings affect others’ surroundings and so on. You affect them, or affect them by not affecting them. We live in a world of systems that the collective “us” have created and constructed for ourselves. We create babies, we create new technologies, we create positions for ourselves in major international business conglomerates - where none existed before. We create things for us. We make things up to make ourselves better. We give ourselves something to do…to be. The collective “us” are our own means to our own end. We are our own reasons.

Both simply and complexly, we live within and have formed a symbiotic relationship with these constructs. Here I am talking about basic things that keep society working. Not necessarily hunting and gathering and basic medical necessity, but the economic marketplace, trade, and monetary systems…some form of capitalism. We keep them alive so we can keep us alive. So we can be comfortable to a point. There also exists a plethora of constructs that have grown from non-life-integral components in very recent years. Things that we do not depend upon for societal-sustainability. These are the constructs of show business.

The advent of the television screen saw great possibility for education, telecommunication, and general societal betterment; while the maturation of the same technology saw the opposite effect. As the medium solidified, and started to age soon after its inception, we crammed professional sporting events, political debates, industrial disasters, the neighbor’s funny video of grandpa getting batted in the crotch by a nerf wielding five-year-old - and anything else we could think of - into this glowing box of inanity. And what gets the highest ratings? So-called “reality television”. As the meat of the world gets put through the grinder of television, we are left with a malodorous entertainment-paste. Politics, literature, world-history, global crisis and other major news events even are appropriated and metamorphosized into tasty balls of infotainment by both Top-Down and Bottom-Up Media. Entertainment is all around us. It is us. And it smells like a grade-schooler’s cafeteria.

Modern entertainment’s part-time job as an innocent distraction from the tedium of “life” sowed the seeds from which grew the even more modern concept of, and obsession with, “celebrity”. As Neal Gabler, author of Life the Movie states,

What traditional entertainment always promised was to transport us from our daily problems, to enable us to escape from the travails of life…When life itself is an entertainment medium, however, this process is obviously altered…By conflating the two and converting everything from the kidnapping of the Lindbergh Baby to the marital misadventures of Elizabeth Taylor into entertainments that transport us from our problems, we need never leave the theater’s comfort. We can remain constantly distracted. Or put another way, we have finally learned how to escape from life into life.

The self-made constructs we reside within have made life and entertainment indistinguishable, indivisible. Fame has always existed. There have always been those that have risen above the commonplace and achieved great things. Notoriety. Some are even known and immortalized for their unforgivable evils, for their detriment to the world. But it has always been the case that these men, women, and sometimes children are remembered, archived even for a notable act, a deed, a doing that impacted society for better or for worse. Fame is a genuine and natural by-product of a system of invented constructs. It is my conception/perception however, that it is now the case that hundreds of men and women the world over, but mainly in America, are becoming known, lauded, scorned, and obsessed over, for the simple reason that they are becoming known, lauded, scorned and obsessed over. This is the content vacant concept of celebrity. It differs from fame in the sense that celebrity is an unnatural by-product of the construct of life. Celebrity is an invention within an invention. This is the individual product that is well-known for being well-known. And we cannot get enough of it.

Why is this a problem – something to be wary of? “What’s the big deal with a little distraction?” you say. “What’s the worst that could happen?” Unfortunately, the worst has happened. We are well within the process of a major and total detachment from the gravity and reality of the real…of real life. And this process has its roots in entertainment. Every last person wants to succeed. Every last person has a desire to become successful. Whether that means seeing yourself on the big screen or working at your local grocery store. Success is scalable. The problem enters when we are raised on the bedtime news-stories of life. News’ protagonists (the individuals who are the subjects of the headlines) are, or are now celebrities. Instead of living life, modern society has taken to performing life. As Neal Gabler comments,

While the general public is an audience for the life movie, it is also an active participant in it. An ever-growing segment of the American economy is now devoted to designing, building and then dressing the sets in which we live, work, shop and play; to creating our costumes, to making our hair shine and our faces glow; to slenderizing our bodies; to supplying our props – all so that we can appropriate the trappings of celebrity, if not the actuality of it, for the life movie.

Martha Stewart and Dr. Phil have become our drama coaches.

The extent of knowledge that we have about ourselves is diminishing at a dangerous pace precisely because we look without rather than within for validation and cues to tell us what to do with our lives. Doctors and Pharmacologists are now celebrities. The author David Foster Wallace is describes in his book-jacket bio as the first “rock-star-author”. Anyone can be a celebrity. You could be on the next “Real-World” just being you. There exists an ego-driven kernel of motivation in every endeavor that we embark upon. The desire for success is becoming almost synonymous with the desire for celebrity. Witness the motivating factors of “getting blogged.” (I’d do anything to get on Rocketboom) These day-to-day tasks are gradually changing the very core of self-understanding. Our children are growing up not as themselves, but as everyone they have ever wanted to be like in the “lifies”. We all adapt to our situations. We all wear some kind of mask in public, however these masks are changing our facial features underneath – changing the structure of our bones, the way our faces look - becoming so ingrained in the “why” of doing things that they are beginning to affect the very “what” of doing things. These masks are becoming increasingly harder and harder to remove and if we do manage to rip one free, the face underneath is now indistinguishable from the mask on top. This is to say that it is not just the internal make-up of our beings that we are losing contact with and actively changing, but our actions are changing based on the context of our performed lives. Everyone is becoming the stars of their own little movies. It is not enough anymore to do good work and be recognized for it. That recognition now needs to attain a higher level. What we know about ourselves we know from the constructs of the world around us and how we fit into the mechanism of a hyper-accomplishment-driven society. What we know about ourselves isn’t very much. What we know about ourselves is based on a made-up system. What we know about ourselves isn’t true. We are lying.

So. How do we change it? We realize that we are becoming much less truthful to ourselves the more we aspire to greatness, the more we are driven by the recognition of accomplishment, the more this notion is reified by the masses, but how do we stop?

Get rid of Top-down Media. Corporate-controlled entertainment media and infotainment are the largest contributors and structural elements in this construct within a construct. Controlling society’s addiction to this collaborative-fiction will strip many of the masks we wear in everyday life. Without a celebrity-factory to churn out our lifestyle-of-the-rich-and-famous lead-by-example-role-models, we may passively begin to see the dust of inner-reflection begin stirring anew. This is a start. I see a need to explore further however.

Get rid of Bottom-Up Media. The supposed subversion of Top-Down Media by the likes of Bottom-Up Media is a fallacy. This subversion is driven by the same factors that keep Top-Down Media in place and keep us paying attention to begin with. Subversion of a system from within is the most effective way to do such a thing, however the subverting element is always lured by the same oppressions it is trying to subvert. The problem is not who is in control of the system, but the system itself. The authorship society we live in is a perfect example of this. The masses now have the tools to create. Democracy is in business. Now the audience has an option. Low quality, or self-interest driven content. Without Top-Down Media to subvert, Bottom-Up Media raises to the top without contention to take the reigns left free. Bottom-Up Media become the Top-Down Media, new celebrities emerge, and the cycle starts anew. Democratic media is still a hierarchical media in which those who wish to succeed will still have to crawl their ways to the top. There is a top. It is scalable. I want to be BoingBoing-ed so bad. I want to be the next Amanda Congdon. What else is there then?

Get rid of all media. All entertainment. All art. All creativity and luxury that is produced for money. One will still have the agency to be creative, but one no longer has the ability to make a living from it. Commodification of creativity is the problem. “But Andrew! -- “ You’re no doubt exclaiming, “The masses need an opiate! No one likes religion anymore - ! – what do we do?!” I suggest we give the people what they want. Themselves. Rather than structuring our lives around a product, let’s structure our lives around our lives. “But! – “ you again exclaim, “aren’t we already doing that by keeping our lives documented on livejournal.com, our friends documented on riya.com, our social networks in check with dodgeball.com, and our business affairs in order with Google shared calendar?” Sure we are. But what if we thought about our lives and the archiving and publication of our lives as if no one else could see. The fact that people love to discuss themselves is a trend that exists in the current media, which can act as a suitable springboard for such an inversion. Let’s get individuals telling themselves about themselves. True egocentric media. What pretense falls away when we get used to not entertaining an audience? What truths may begin to emerge? Let’s say goodbye to our social networks and blogging superstar hopes and worthless “comment-on-society” art projects (art will never win an election or stop a bomb) and start living life instead of performing life. Let’s do it. Not together. The collective “us” is separate. We are all removed. We’ll meet back up in a few years and see what we’ve come up with.

Dismantle entertainment, get off the grid and step outside the system. It is not an impossible task. It’ll start with you. And it’ll end with you. That is the most important thing.

Posted by andrew schneider at 04:13 PM

March 30, 2006

truth in practice | Theoretical Perspectives

Show and tell. My week. Past weeks have included an audio sampling consisting of semi-obscure works of poetry as read by their respective not-as-obscure authors : Ong's Orality and Literacy; a demo on Multi-User-Domains from someone who had recently registered with an "adult" MUD and revealed some of the "orientation" to this new environment. My week is Reader-Response-Theory and Reception Theory. I decided to bring in samples of TWG's work (the Young Frankenstein section from the showHouse/Lights which I was fortunate to be involved with at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn). I was interested in the simulacra and steps of disassociation from original material. House/Lights combines the text of Gertrude Stein's Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights with a 60's B-soft-core-porn-flick, Olga's House of Shame. I also decided to show something I had prepared, but wasn't necessarily decided on showing.
I remember an English teacher of mine from high school recalling the second hand story of a Flannery O'Connor exchange she had read about. A literature class had spent the good portion of a semester in 1961 dissecting the notoriously symbolic language of Flannery O'Connor's short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find" The Professor of the class wrote a letter to Ms. O'Connor detailing the classes close reading of the story and what its conclusion's were regarding the symbolism of the text. She wrote a response unflinchingly debunking the theory.

Interpretation.

This was a relevant example to discuss Reader-Response-Theory, I thought. And due to intense previous class discussion's involving the importance of "the original" and the notion of the "first edition" and "the document", I decided to forge the response Flannery wrote to that Professor of English many years ago. A cake-pan full of coffee and tea, a font called "1942 report", and some crumpling were enough to illicit little or no questioning regarding the authenticity of the required document.

Was authority gained with the possession of the "real" document? Was it more impressive than the printed online article from which it was pulled? Is it detrimental to the trust fostered in a classroom dedicated to open-ness of thought and understanding of media theory? I'd certainly like to that that it was at least more creative.

Posted by andrew schneider at 11:21 PM

March 10, 2006

Truth in Content : Who Does it Matter To? (long)

When I tell people by the water cooler that I haven't watched television in over fifteen years, some people want to know why. I usually tell them that I haven't owned a set since my family got rid of the broken one we had sitting on the end table in the living room. They usually ask why not. And I usually tell them, as matter-of-factly as I will tell you now, because my uncle Rick put my head though the glass of a 27” solid-state unit in an alcoholic fit of rage when I was nine. Do you want to see the scars? I had changed the channel to "Picture-Pages" without asking. Do you want to hear about what happened the time I accidentally broke the whisky glass which my dad, his dead brother, gave him before he died, in an event my uncle would later refer to as "the will-gift fuck-up"? Would you like to know what the results of improper use of a manual can opener look like? They usually don't ask any more questions. That's where the conversation usually stops. But that's usually because by this time I'm sweating and my eyes haven't blinked for a few minutes and I may have accidentally backed them into a corner. It is real. They feel trapped. Physically. Mentally. Obligatory pity. After escaping this awkward situation, rarely does anyone report that they felt fascinated, transported, entertained.

What about you. Don’t you have just the smallest twinge of interest as to why I always wear long sleeves? Aren’t you just slightly curious as to how soon Uncle Rick will make parole? Don’t you want to hear about "the will-gift fuck up"? If I explained it to you in the form of an op-ed piece for a class at NYU, doesn’t that make it just a little less real? A little more safe? A little more…entertaining?

I have a confession to make. I haven’t been telling you the truth. Of course I have a television. I watched the evening news not more than a half hour ago. My uncle's name is Jim, and I don't even think he's ever had a drink in his whole life. I've never actually seen Picture Pages. No scars. No can opener. No pity. I am a liar, a fabricator, an author.

When stories like the JT Leroy hoax and the James Frey memoir/Oprah embarrassment happen, we, the public, react. However, we constantly react in a way that is counter-intuitive. When Oprah lets us know that we have been collectively duped, it is not so much that we feel hurt (as in "we have been deceived"), as we feel disappointed at the unmasking of our man behind the curtain. Our entertainment value has been soured. Once we believe those awful stories about the back-alley abortion, we want them to be true forever. Where we once had a miscreant to feel superior to, now we learn they were as normal as any of us growing up. After the strings have been cut from our collective suspension of disbelief, we are returned to the maelstrom of mediocrity. We again feel the call of obligatory accomplishment, which we are all too ready to tie directly to success. We want to know that those things happened to someone. Mirror Neurons hard at work. Empathy. Sympathy. Self-pity. Those vacationing in various tropical destinations when the tsunami hit the village of Banda Aceh in December of 2004 felt both a twinge of guilt and a greater connectedness with the disaster than those of us further away. It's an "I was affected more than you were" kind of reaction we cannot help but feel – we have a ridiculous and arbitrary superficial connection to something that hasn't really affected us at all. We crave a something outside ourselves. The fantastic. The impossible. We crave the story.

Perhaps it isn’t our fault though. The concept of the “daily news” has been dressing information in entertainment’s clothing for decades. Reality T.V. as well has been sating the mainstream’s voyeuristic urges since “The Real World”. And we love it. Not because it is real. But because it is sublimely unreal. "This is the story...of one person...who lives in a dreary apartment...in Queens." That's my life. Who's going to tune in to me? The formula for good reality television, indeed for most entertainment does not lie in the real, but in the hyper-real, the theatre of the ridiculous. The truth is, while my insignificant tale from above may lack the weight and length of a traditional homespun memoir, Americans love a good story, more than they do reality. We love the drama, the antithesis of the mundane, reality, our lives. We would much prefer to be lied to, so long as the lie is laced with the sweet nectar of entertainment. No one wants to be bothered with normality1.

American Academy Award nominated talk show host and magazine publisher Oprah Winfrey, in the highly publicized second interview with debunked "A Million Little Pieces" author James Frey commented, "...as a reader I'm believing you because it's on the bookshelf as a memoir." Really? He's a drug addict, writing about being a drug addict, writing a memoir (from the Latin memoria, meaning "memory"), an intimate and personal account of drug addiction. With this foreknowledge, what kind of information retrieval would you trust this man with? Would you trust him with your medical records at the hospital? If he can write a book detailing the use of alcohol and drugs, he must be a reliable source, right? Something is rotten in this logic. We bought the book because Oprah told us to. We have instilled our trust in Oprah. Oprah has instilled her trust in James Frey because, as she has said, "it's on the bookshelf as a memoir." I wonder if she believes the President of the United States because he is in office. In fact, former president Clinton was on her show. I don't remember talk of his disappointing a nation because he had lied to them about personal details. Further, in response to those who would claim that the whole affair is a tragedy because his book was helpful to people, I would argue most who read James Frey's tale are not drug addicts, and are not looking to the book as a self-help guide, but rather read it for it's entertainment value. The very meaning of the word entertainment stems from the idea of holding one's attention. And how do we achieve this? With the fantastical. With the surreal. Why should we question the inherent entertainment value of the memoir industry as this country continues to churn out title like, "Callgirl: Confessions of an Ivy League Lady of Pleasure," and "Bat Boy: My True Life Adventures Coming of Age With the New York Yankees." No form of entertainment can be entrusted to tell an unbiased truth. Truth shifts in parallel with our ever evolving tool-set of communication. What about Callgirl author Jeannette Angell? Do we trust her more or less than Frey? Really? Ah, yes…she hasn’t yet been on the Oprah show. How upset will we be when it is reported that she hasn’t really slept with a quarter of those she claims to have?

Obviously our "authorship society" is leveling the playing field for user-generated content. Unfortunately that level is reaching a low-water mark. More and more product floods the market everyday. As Daniel Boorstin, author of The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America warns, “We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that they can live in them.” We seek to become the very product we can't seem to consume enough of. We look to people like Martha Stewart and Oprah Winfrey to instruct us how to attain the “life-movie” we star in everyday in our mind’s eye. We long to be the life pored over. We long for our 15 minutes of fame. We long for our fifteen minutes of non-privacy. We long to be exploited. Newer generations are starting to put these desires into practice earlier and earlier. Twelve and Thirteen-year-olds are already obsessively exploiting themselves on social-networking sites such as the massively popular (and NewsCorp owned) MySpace.com or high school-themed myYearbook.com. 43things.com provides a forum specifically titled “write a memoir,” where people like “Becky” postulate, “i’ve already written my memoir – my blog over the past 4 years… i need to give it some form.. i don’t think daily diary entries is a good format for a book. or maybe it is (see “diary of anne frank”, etc).”

As William Grimes has commented, "the genre has become so inclusive that it's almost impossible to imagine which life experiences do not qualify as memoir material." I hope it is sooner rather than later that we, the consuming audience, realize that we do not want to know about "us", or others like us for that matter, in the ways that we are currently selling ourselves. What we want is archetypal figures upon which to model a mode of behavior and personality. We want to be cool. We want to be sophisticated. We want to be told what that is. We do not look to ourselves. We do not trust ourselves. We trust the Dr. Phil’s and Oprah Winfrey’s (and Slashdot’s and BoingBoing’s or any other brand of coolness) of the world. The masses do not want to be trendsetters. Trend-setting by the masses are horses designed by committee.

It is the duty of the entertainment-industry to entertain. Why should we expect anything less from a memoir. Some have called the Frey escapade a hoax. A memoir hoax? What about the other genre’s. Could there be a “VH1: Behind the Music” hoax? What about the movies? As Anthony Lane of the New Yorker posits in his March 2006 article "Telling Tales," "...there is no such thing as a cinematic hoax. Even the worst movies are made in good faith, and, if you start condemning public figures for pretending to something they're not, what do you do about actors?" I wonder how many Oprah fans watch her show for the wondrous amounts of hard facts it puts forth. Come on, everyone dresses up for the camera a little. If Oprah wants the real truth from the entertainment industry, she should start by setting precedent. No more make-up for Oprah from now on. No more cameras either, or sets. Just invite the studio audience that wants to come down as usual for a rap session. You and Oprah, hanging out, talking straight about drugs. No decoration. No TV personalities. No entertainment. Period. Is that what you want?

Somehow, we have to reconcile our absolute obsession with the concept of celebrity and our motivation for user-generated content. We have to start again from the beginning,” Umberto Eco writes, “asking one another what’s going on.”

The full-length commentary is also available as an ironic videocast, which can be found here

Posted by andrew schneider at 02:29 PM

Truth in Content : Who Cares? (short)

I haven't watched television in over fifteen years. Some people want to know why. I them I haven't owned a set since my family got rid of the broken one we had sitting on the end table in the living room. They ask why not. Because my uncle Rick put my head though the glass of a 27” solid-state unit in an alcoholic fit of rage when I was nine. I had changed the channel to "Picture-Pages" without asking. They usually don't ask any more questions. That's where the conversation usually stops. But that's because by this time I'm sweating and my eyes haven't blinked for a few minutes and I may have accidentally backed them into a corner. It is real. It isn’t a tale they are reading in a newspaper or journal. We are there. They feel trapped. Physically. Mentally. Obligatory pity. After escaping this awkward situation, rarely does anyone report that they felt fascinated, transported, entertained.

What about you. Aren’t you just slightly curious as to how soon Uncle Rick will make parole? If I explained it to you in the form of a writing exercise, doesn’t that make it just a little less real? A little more safe? A little more…entertaining?

I have a confession to make. I haven’t been telling you the truth. Of course I have a television. I watched the morning news not more than a half hour ago. My uncle's name is Jim, and I don't think he's had a drink in his entire life. I've never actually seen “Picture Pages”. No scars. No pity. I am a liar, a fabricator…an author.

When stories like the JT Leroy hoax and the James Frey memoir/Oprah embarrassment happen, we, the public, react. However, we constantly react in a way that is counter-intuitive. When Oprah lets us know that we have been collectively duped, it is not so much that we feel hurt (as in "we have been deceived"), as we feel disappointed at the unmasking of our man behind the curtain. Our entertainment value has been soured. Where we once had a miscreant to feel superior to, now we learn they were as normal as any of us growing up. No escape. We want to know that those things happened to someone. Mirror Neurons hard at work. Empathy. Sympathy. Self-pity. We crave a something outside ourselves. The fantastic. The impossible. We crave the story. No one wants to be bothered with normality.

Perhaps it isn’t our fault. The concept of the “daily news” has been dressing information in entertainment’s clothing for decades. Reality T.V. as well has been sating the mainstream’s voyeuristic urges since “The Real World”. And we love it. Not because it is real. But because it is sublimely unreal. "This is the story...of one person...who lives in a dreary apartment...in Queens." That's my life. Who's going to tune in to me? The formula for good reality television, indeed for most mainstream entertainment does not lie in the real, but in the hyper-real, the theatre of the ridiculous. The truth is, while my insignificant tale from above may lack the weight and length of a traditional homespun memoir, Americans love a good story, more than they do reality. We love the drama, the antithesis of the mundane, reality, our lives. We would much prefer to be lied to, so long as the lie is laced with the sweet nectar of entertainment.

American Academy Award nominated talk show host and magazine publisher Oprah Winfrey, in the highly publicized second interview with debunked "A Million Little Pieces" author James Frey commented, "...as a reader I'm believing you because it's on the bookshelf as a memoir." Really? He's a drug addict, writing about being a drug addict, writing a memoir (from the Latin memoria, meaning "memory"), an intimate and personal account of drug addiction. With this foreknowledge, what kind of information retrieval would you trust this man with? We bought the book because Oprah told us to. We have instilled our trust in Oprah. Oprah has instilled her trust in James Frey because, as she has said, "…it's on the bookshelf as a memoir." I wonder if she believes the President of the United States because he is in office. In fact, former president Clinton was on her show. I don't remember talk of his disappointing a nation because he had lied to them about personal details. In response to those who would claim that the whole affair is a “tragedy” because his book was helpful to people, I would argue most who read James Frey's tale are not drug addicts, and are not looking to the book as a self-help guide, but rather read it for it's entertainment value – the vicarious experience, a romance novel for would-be drug users. No form of entertainment can be entrusted to tell an unbiased truth. Truth shifts in parallel with our ever evolving tool-set of communication.

Obviously our "authorship society" is leveling the playing field for user-generated content. Unfortunately that level is reaching a low-water mark. More and more product floods the market everyday. As Daniel Boorstin, author of The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America warns, “We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that they can live in them.” We seek to become the very product we can't seem to consume enough of. We look to people like Martha Stewart and Oprah Winfrey to instruct us how to attain the “life-movie” we star in everyday in our mind’s eye. We long to be the life pored over. We long for our 15 minutes of fame. We long for our 15 minutes of non-privacy. We long to be exploited. Newer generations are starting to put these desires into practice earlier and earlier. Twelve and Thirteen-year-olds are already obsessively exploiting themselves on social-networking sites such as the massively popular (and NewsCorp owned) MySpace.com or high school-themed myYearbook.com. 43things.com provides a forum specifically titled “write a memoir,” where people like “Becky” postulate, “i’ve already written my memoir – my blog over the past 4 years… i need to give it some form.. i don’t think daily diary entries is a good format for a book. or maybe it is (see “diary of anne frank”, etc).” Are any of us really listening, or are we simply waiting for our turn to talk?

As William Grimes, contributor to the New York Times, has commented, "the genre has become so inclusive that it's almost impossible to imagine which life experiences do not qualify as memoir material." I hope it is sooner rather than later that we, the consuming audience, realize that we do not want to know about “us”. What we want is archetypal figures upon which to model a mode of behavior and personality. We want to be cool. We want to be sophisticated. We want to be told what that is. We do not look to ourselves. We do not want control. We do not trust ourselves. We trust the Dr. Phil’s and Oprah Winfrey’s (and Slashdot’s and BoingBoing’s or any other brand of coolness) of the world. The masses do not want to be trendsetters. Trend-setting by the masses are horses designed by committee.

It is the duty of the entertainment-industry to entertain. I wonder how many Oprah fans watch her show for the wondrous amounts of hard facts it puts forth. Even no-nonsense Oprah dresses up for the camera a little. If Ms. Winfrey wants the real truth from the entertainment industry, she should start by setting precedent. No more make-up for Oprah from now on. No more cameras either, or sets. Just invite the studio audience that wants to come down as usual for a rap session. You and Oprah, hanging out, talking straight about drugs. No decoration. No TV personalities. No entertainment. Period. Is that what you want?

Somehow, we have to reconcile our absolute obsession with the concept of celebrity and our motivation for user-generated content. “We have to start again from the beginning,” Umberto Eco writes, “asking one another what’s going on.”

This paper contains edits. The full-length commentary is also available as an ironic videocast, which can be found here

Posted by andrew schneider at 02:20 PM