Echo-class survey ship (1957)

Transcription

[pause] [applause] Speaker 1: Thank you. Thanks for coming. I should say upfront that a casualty of the digital age has been my wristwatch. So if you see me looking at my phone periodically, it's just because I'm checking how the time is progressing and not texting people while we have a panel. [chuckle] So, first of all, let me just introduce our fantastic panel. This is Mark Kingwell. Mark is a professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto and a contributing editor to Harper's Magazine. Among his many, many books of political and cultural theory are multiple national best sellers. His most recent book is the essay collection Unruly Voices. Next to him is Sara Grimes. Sara is a professor with the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto and Associate Director of the Semaphore Lab, which is a fantastic name for a lab. Her research explores the cultural politics of children's media and digital games, as well as the political economies of social technologies. And, finally, Johanna Schneller is one of North America's leading freelance journalists specializing in entertainment features. She's profiled the most prominent actors of our time. Her cover stories have appeared in a variety of major magazines. She writes a weekly Fame Game column in The Globe and Mail. So, welcome to you all. Looking forward to your thoughts. [applause] S1: So this isn't a book report that we're doing here. Fahrenheit 451 is sort of a jumping off point for our cultural discussion. But just, if you haven't read the book, just give you a really quick synopsis. Guy Montag is a fireman in a future world where books are banned and the fireman's job is to burn them where they're found, along with the houses of the people who have them. But, in fact, most people don't want books. They're very happy looking at these giant customized video screens of entertainment or listening to audio all the time on sea shells. Books are considered destructive because they encourage thinking, seriousness, and can lead to sadness. Tonight, we're gonna look at whether that vision of the future reflects our reality and, in particular, whether the culture of 24/7 media access is destructive of deeper thoughts, deeper relationships, and a deeper understanding of the self. So, let's jump in, shall we? S1: So, the book imagines this future where books are banned. But I think, more importantly, basically, no one's interested in reading books or very few people are, and they're not really interested in what you might consider rigorous thinking. So, how reflective do you think that is of our current situation? Johanna, would you like to kick off? Johanna Schneller: Well, I spent today reading Fahrenheit 451, which I hadn't read since high school and joining Twitter, which I think is kind of a good thing to do [laughter] in keeping one honest with, I'm not gonna say which. But I did find [chuckle] at just about every hour, I had to get up and see how many more Twitter followers were following me because I got very invested, ego-maniacally, in how many people were not following me. And so, I realized like to keep the concentration on the book, it's so interesting because people are so used to wanting to feel connected at all times. And I think this is what it comes down to, people following me in real time felt like I was with other people. The book, you're reading it by yourself. Even though we're all reading it together, there is that kind of feeling of connectedness versus isolation. And I think maybe, we haven't really reached the part we wanna ban books, but I think we might be reaching the point where we're terrified of doing anything in isolation. That's my opening salvo. S1: Sara. Sara Grimes: Wow. Really. Yeah. Alright. [laughter] I wanna talk more about that. I think that there's a bunch of different things going on. Definitely, the always on and always available media can be very distracting. And, certainly, in my own life and speaking to my students, it hasbeen a big source of distraction. Of course, there's a number of people who are quite interested in how this shift toward multitasking and thinking of it not as much in terms of a distracted state, but as a multitasking kind of, multiple engaged state is compelling. It's interesting. I hope that that is successful at some point 'cause that's certainly not how I experience being able to learn and being able to accomplish tasks myself. But that there's promise there is interesting and compelling. SG: In terms of how that disrupts deep thought though, I don't completely think that it only serves as a distracting function because, certainly, the access to information, the ability to go deeper and to do research, and the opening up of that type of information and access to learning new things, learning how to do things, finding out how to make something, or finding out how to research something, as well as engaging with other people in that process is also happening through social media in particular, different Internet kinds of technologies. And that's enabling all kinds of citizen research, citizen innovation and invention, as well as a sharing of those things. So, I guess it really depends on the context. S1: Mark, the culture of the book? Mark Kingwell: Yeah. Is this the moment to say that Fahrenheit 451 is not a very good book? [laughter] S1: Now we've got everyone in the room, you can say it now. MK: I know. And I wasn't party to the decision to make it the keynote book for this series of very important cultural events. But since it's raining, I"m gonna rain on the parade. It's not a good book. And what's interesting about that is that the freedom to say that a book with a good idea is in fact not a good book is a complicated kind of intellectual freedom, which I think may be more and more in danger of leaving us because it's the whole two different ideas in mind at once. Important idea, bad execution. I'm putting it crudely, but it's a subtlety of mind which only certain kinds of media and only certain kinds of reflection actually allow us to embrace and think through. So I was struck by reading the book for the first time since high school, [A], by the fact that, aesthetically, it's unaccomplished, but [B], it has this really interesting character, which is not Guy Montag, the fireman, but the fire chief, who he... Sorry, spoiler alert, who he kills... [laughter] MK: He immolates at a certain stage in the book. Sorry... I'm not sorry. And he plays the role that O'Brien plays in Orwell's "1984" or Mustapha Mond plays in Huxley's "Brave New World". He's what happens to intellectuals in a dystopian future. They become cynical to a degree that we can barely imagine, even in our own age. And I think that's an interesting moment that intellectual energy might be bent to the underlying ideology of a dominant social system in a way that isn't innocent but, in fact, is complicit. And that's the one thing that I think we should take away from this book. And I do wanna make it relevant to today that what we're witnessing now is not so much this kind of distraction, of course, that's there, but it's our own complicity with it, that I think is most interesting. To follow through on the Twitter thing, I have a Twitter account and I've never tweeted. I'm like Johanna, I'm sort of curious to see how many followers I can get without ever once tweeting. [laughter] So those of you who are on Twitter please become my followers because... And I promise never to break the silence. I will be the Bartleby the Scrivener of tweeting. I would prefer not to tweet and my silence will become a work of art over time. [laughter] JS: Really? If you tweet me, I'll tweet you back. [laughter] S1: The question beyond the issue of distractability, there's that question of, like, is there something about the book as a linear form, like as that type of narrative that gives it some kind of special currency beyond our ability to get information from multiple sources. MK: I don't think it's the linearity. I think Johanna had it right, it's the isolation. It's the willingness to be alone and to sign yourself to the world as alone. That's the intimacy that's peculiar to this medium, which is the thoughts of some other person rendered into a test which you then ingest or spend time with, and you don't engage with anything else in the world while you're doing that, that's what makes the book the book. It's not linearity or even extended argument. It's that isolation. I guess... I mean, for better or worse, we can talk about the better and worse, but for better or worse, people just don't seem willing to so isolate as time goes on. JS: Well, I think that there's ways... It's the only way that I can explain to myself the phenomenon of "Fifty Shades of Grey", which is really an execrable book and the worst written book ever in the history of the world. And yet, it's on every bestseller list, and people are reading it like crazy, and they're making a movie. So, it's obviously not about the quality, right? You can't really say, "Is the book dead?" because people buy books all the time. It's, "Is our discernment about what's good also fading a little bit?" Like, is it more important to be part of something where you're buying the same book that everybody else is buying at the same time than it is to actually have any sort of... It seems to me what we're willing to do, and this is the first step, I think Bradbury was a little more prescient than you give him credit for, but the first step in the dumbing down of everything was the idea that there is no such thing as good and bad or high and low, that people stopped being discerning. And the minute you stop being able to say this is good or this is bad and you have to accept everything then I think you get yourself in a little bit of trouble. MK: Just to... For the record, it's not the prescience that I think is wrong about it. It's the actual execution of the story. JS: Yeah. No, no, no, I know. I know. MK: The characterization, the dialogue... JS: I guess, I just mean I give it more credit for being prescient even though the writing is... MK: Yeah, I mean, look it's great. It's still in print. It's... Buy copies, buy copies. Tell his estate that they need more money, send it to them. It's all good. [laughter] S1: Sara, you study children's cultural practises around technology. Do you find that there's still... I don't know if this is specifically with your research, but that they're still open to that kind of solitary experience of the book? Or, is their very nature with the world so much more social and connected? SG: Yeah, I guess, there are a lot of different examples where kids and adults spend solitary moments with different media. It's not just a book thing, right? People watch movies on their own, and television, and play video games on their own. And, in terms of being just you and the text, this is pretty... It's pretty common. I wouldn't isolate that to just the book. Maybe there is something special about that relationship that some people have with certain books, but the solo-ness definitely happens a lot. Kids spend a lot of time alone, more time than most of them would like. And that striving to connect and finding ways to connect through different devices and different kinds of technologized media context often comes from actually feeling like they have too much time alone and too much time in isolation, at least among middle class kids who are only children and living in an area where you're not allowed to go play outside, and that kind of thing. So, yeah, I'm not sure I agree with this kind of characterization of either the connectedness or the identification of books as the one moment that we have to enjoy media on our own. MK: Well, again, I feel like I'm now correcting the things that I've said before, but [laughter] it's not the solo-ness that's important, it's the communion with one other person's mind. It's the consciousness of consciousness that is, I think, unique to the book. I don't think there's another medium that comes close. And so, the film, video, video game thing doesn't answer that point. It's that these are the thoughts of one other person, and you are one person, and this is a mystery, that we have consciousness in this form of person-hood. And I can tell you from my report from the cutting edge of philosophy, there is such a thing. Trust me. We don't understand person-hood, we don't understand consciousness, it's an enduring problem. And there is no medium in the history of human civilization that has made the problem more vivid than the book. And I mean that as, specifically, the technology. MK: I think you can off-load the technology to other kinds of delivery systems. I don't mean video games, but say, Kindles or whatnot, but even that is a different thing, better or worse. Again, I'm not saying... But the choice, for example, of which book to take with you when you go on a trip, you can take every book there is, and you have eliminated the problem of making that choice. And the problem with making that choice is a choice of consciousness. It's a choice about what it means to be a self. And so, if you take that out of the equation, we've changed the nature of consciousness. Now, I knew that this would happen. [laughter] I said when we did the pre-interview last week, I would be cast as the curmudgeon. And I have, perhaps, cast myself that way. Is there anybody else in the room who has never owned a cellphone? [pause] MK: Awesome. You are my people. [applause] MK: I don't think that that's so important except that it's a flight from this constant availability. I'm a private person, my consciousness is my own. I will share it with others when and if I choose. You can't reach me 24 hours a day. [applause] S1: This is something that comes up in... MK: I knew this would happen. [laughter] JS: Great audience. S1: The library people are your people. S1: This is one of the things that really does come up in the book in Fahrenheit 451 beyond the culture of the book in particular, is that people just fill every opportunity for silence, or space with whatever. They have these giant video screens, but they also do things like drive their cars really fast. There's no space for reflection. And that, in particular, beyond the culture of the books, was something that really resonated with me is because I think that we do that. And I think that experience is becoming more and more common, where there's just this part of your brain that's going, "Is anything happening on my phone or whatever?" Which is partly about distraction, but is partly the consequence of filling up your life and the mental space in your environment. JS: Well, it's this, I am seen therefore I am thing. I think we are changing the definition of what we want other people's responses to be. I think that even the language of Twitter, "follow me", is very... I used to live in LA, and when you parked your car, you'd walk in, and they would stamp your ticket, and you would say, "Can you validate me?" [laughter] I thought that was so apt for LA, because everybody's just walking and going, "Can you validate, validate, validate, validate me?" [laughter] JS: "Please validate me." And so, all day long I kept thinking, "Please validate me. Please see me. Please acknowledge that I am here." And I think all of that, reality TV stars, and people's hunger for being seen has to be coming from somewhere, I think. And it's not just the desire to be famous, I don't think. I think there must be something in this technology that creates a need. It's like if you get a catalogue in the mail from LL Bean, you suddenly really need boots, and you didn't need them five minutes ago. And I think it must be the same thing. I think that, maybe, not having a cellphone, or not having an iPod, or whatever is the only way to protect yourself from this thing that gets created in you instantaneously, don't you think? SG: I mean it's interesting thinking of before this... Not democratization exactly 'cause it's not, but more widespread access to the ability to present self in a mass media kind of a forum. And all those years of being so exposed to celebrity culture, and this idea of elites, and this idea of what was important, and who is important, and this kind of almost like a build up need of being part of that, and saying, "We're here too." I'm very curious about that as well. MK: You know, of course, it's a point worth making that this is actually not new. I was reading... Just to take a proximate example, I was reading today, Dwight Macdonald, a great cultural critic from the middle part of the last century. And he was writing in 1957 about what he called the tyranny of facts. And he said the only rescue from the American tyranny of facts was a kind of flight from this constant over-exposure to news, the news cycle, the having to know things, the having to keep up with things. It's 1957, before the Internet, before I was born, before I'm sure, some of us... Others were born. So the novelty that we tend to put on our current situation is itself something that's worth querying. People have often felt this overwhelming sense of having to keep up. And they've often, if not always, in the modern era anyway, felt this idea that somehow as individuals, they need to assert themselves or they have to be present. They have to be recognized. MK: I mean the fact is, the sad fact is, we're not nearly as important as we think we are. And we keep trying to convince ourselves otherwise, and one of the ways we do this is by saying, "I have this many friends. I have this many followers". This is just a new kind of twist on a very old desire. I was thinking the other day also of Jennifer Egan's novel "A Visit from the Goon Squad", the last part of which, I think, is a brilliant piece of dystopian fiction which depicts a very near future where people can no longer communicate face-to-face, like we're doing, I mean, in this artificial way. They can only... They would rather text face-to-face because they can do it more efficiently and they can get their meaning clearer that way. And I thought, "Well, that's what the future looks like." It's the same future that the earlier past looked to us. We're always trying to communicate who we are as clearly as we think we want to. And the technology is far less important than that desire. But the desire is doomed to failure because we will never be able to show to somebody else exactly who we are. The world will not ever recognize exactly who we are. S1: Yeah, that's what the present looks like in Jennifer Egan's book because I have a 20-year old daughter and I've watched her exchange 17 texts with people for one thing like, "Are we meeting here or here?" And I said to her, "Haley, you know if you pick up the phone, you can actually do this in one second?" And they won't because it's too intimate. MK: Yeah. S1: There's too much interaction in that. She said, "Mom, we save phone calls for like only really important things. If I call them up, it would be inappropriate." MK: Yeah. S1: And this is where we are. MK: I have to say, the one thing... The one boon as a teacher, I don't know Sara if you've had this experience, used to drive me crazy in my lectures when students cellphones went off, when they rang. They never ring anymore 'cause they're just texting. [laughter] So I can't stop them talking to each other but, at least, they no longer ring. S1: So, you know, when Bradbury was writing in the early '50s, I mean he was partly critiquing the society. They, obviously, as science fiction writers do, and in particular critiquing mass media, right, critiquing the rise of television as the dominant common cultural language. But we don't necessarily live in that world anymore. We live in a world of the long tail of the Internet and specific niche cultures and this dual nature of, on the one hand, being able to connect to people all over the world over very specific interests but, at the same time, we run the risk of living in these little echo chambers of self regard. So does it make a difference now that where the dominant culture is now Internet culture, which facilitates this ability for more niche connections rather than this mass culture? What difference does that make? Sara? [chuckle] SG: Yes, it's sort of like that but it's not fully like that, right? It's, we don't fully have access. We're not really seeing a huge diversity of voices. There's still such a push to reestablish the mass media. The very industries that became dominant across different media platforms are very actively trying to make sure that they maintain a lot of control. And in terms of where people are going and how they find things, a lot of these web 2.0 kinds of sites like Facebook, they're all like funnels, kind of pushing people back towards the same places. So, all of these possibilities are maybe out there but, in terms of encountering them, it's more than an echo chamber problem. It's not just that you're stuck in your niche. It's that increasingly things are designed, laws are implemented that kind of keep you circulating in the same circles. And, in that respect, we're not really even niching ourselves. We're still very much at least engaging with an idea of a mass, I think. JS: You're wading through more layers to get to it maybe. Like, there's the layer of what this little group is doing, then there's a layer of what everybody else is doing, and then there's the angst over intrusional media. But you sort of have to be aware of all of that now. It's not just enough... You're not all getting in the Bradbury scenario. You can kind of create your own little family on the screens that appear in your living room but everybody's pretty much talking about nothing. And his fear was that we would all drown and then talking about nothing. Whereas, now, I think the fear is that we're all gonna down in talking about too much. MK: I think, I really like Sara's point about that because I think when you look at the way the Internet has been monetized, which is what people forget to look at because they think it's just a kind of information commons, which it isn't at all. It's very constrained and very funnelled, and your preferences, expressed or simply enacted, are constantly being bent back on you. So you are the data. I mean, you are being mined constantly, even if it doesn't feel that way. So the kind of a refraction effect is actually the most important thing about the way the Internet functions. MK: I wanted to say I was struck by one thing in the book "Fahrenheit 451". You mentioned, Nora, that one of the reasons that people object to books is they make them sad. And there's this great scene where there's this kind of coffee klatch of women, Guy's wife and her friends, and he starts reading to them from Dickens, and they cry, and they can't stand it. But the other thing is that when the fire chief comes in at one point, he says, "Don't you know that all those books disagree with each other? Don't you know that one says one thing and the other says another thing?" And I think that's kind of what's lost about this too. MK: If the refraction effect is correct, and I think it is, we're not getting that disagreement. We're not getting dialectical ideas where you're confronted by something that is completely opposite of what you already believe, that actually says to you everything you think is right is wrong and you have to deal with that. You might have to decide maybe to just jettison it or you take in on board and you challenge yourself or you are challenged by it. But instead, if the refraction is correct, you're just getting what you already believe constantly recycled back in your direction. And I think this is one of the big dangers. David Foster Wallace, late David Foster Wallace, defined popular culture in general as the symbolic representation of what people already believe. And I think this is what we have now except it's much more personalized or narcissized. So, you get exactly what you believe constantly coming back to you and coming back to you. S1: No. I mean, to your point, you are absolutely right. But, it is possible for a transgender kid growing up in the middle of nowhere to find people that they otherwise wouldn't be able to find. Or it is possible to find a broader diversity of points of view if you so choose, right? Doesn't that make a difference just in terms of... MK: That's a good point. And I think one of the things that has been most interesting is to watch the creation of community across distance in that way. I mean, the idealized version of this is that it will facilitate diversity or support. There's so much counter evidence though. For every example like that, there is another example of somebody's preferences being sold back to them because of what they posted on Facebook or... I mean, trivial again, but something that you tweeted in an unguarded moment ruins your career and gets you fired from your job. These things are far more capricious and probably more costly than the benefits of, "Yeah, I can find my chosen community with this technology." S1: Johanna, Mark alluded to celebrity culture and since this is something you speak or write openly about, which often gets tarred with the brush of dumbing down the cultures. How do you respond to that? JS: Well, Mark said his role in the panel is to be the curmudgeon and I think mine is to be the Pollyanna. [laughter] JS: I've often, with the Dark Night of the Soul, wondered what it is that I do for a living. Am I making things worse or better? I think on the positive side of pop culture, what it gives people is a kind of language through which they can connect. You start talking about what happened on Mad Men last night and then, hopefully, you start to talk about something in your own life with your own friends. Do you take Betty's side, or Don's side, or blah blah blah? And then pretty soon, you're not talking about them anymore, you're talking about you. And I think that there's always been art for that reason. I think that you need a kind of mediating force before you're really willing to spill your guts. And it's a way we feel each other out. So, in that finding of one another on the Internet, people with whom you agree, it can have that terrible effect of mirrors looking into mirrors looking into mirrors. But it can also still, I think, provide windows for people, where connections can be made. I think you have to fight against the Internet knowing you're pregnant before you've told all your friends because you looked up cribs or something. And then like suddenly... [laughter] JS: But, I think, like all these things, it's not one, it's not only good or only bad. I think it's really up to us how, again, rigorous we are when we use it. Are we going to sink in and just let it carry us away? Or, are we gonna try to maintain some separateness from it and use it? S1: Sara, are there things in youth media practises that you find either heartening or disheartening in this respect? SG: Yes. Well, right now I'm working on a project that's all about things that kids make and share online. So, I'm seeing tons of examples of amazing things. There's definitely an influence of, not as much celebrity culture although that's part it, but maybe... Unless Pokemon is a celebrity, which to some people they are. But media brands and those types of things, as well as very original kinds of creations and the ability to engage with, I think, the shared vocabulary that you're describing. It's not just about being able to talk about what Mad Men look like, but what Mad Men might be. And doing these mash-ups and the things that fans have been doing with fan fiction for many, many years, and Sci-Fi fans have been doing in magazines for years before that. So, there's an engagement that goes on that's really heartening as well. I mean, you can see the presence of those types of media traces as negative, as an influence. But in terms of the subversion, and in terms of the meaning-making, and problematizing gender representation, or remarking that there are no female Ninja Turtles so let's create one and pretend that there is one, and remaking it is really interesting. SG: And then the disheartening part of that is, I guess for me, is this enclosure of children's ability to talk about these things together and to express themselves publicly about them. So, that's like copyright regimes and people going through fan sites and taking down things that are copyright infringement. So, the Ninja Turtles don't get to have a girl Ninja Turtle because that doesn't accord with the brand. And this is an instance of kids appropriating images that they're not allowed to appropriate, which if we're going to think of popular culture, is something that is symbolic. It's something that's meaningful. It's something that's being crammed down our throats or however else we want to think about it. Our ability to critique and engage is probably the most important thing that we have and that we need to protect. S1: No one was telling us that we couldn't critique Rumpelstiltskin or whatever when we were kids, right? The common culture is now so commodified and locked up with copyright, yeah. SG: Yes, if you did reenact some Disney cartoon in your backyard, Disney didn't come and shut you down. [chuckle] Or it was harder for them to find you, yeah. They probably wouldn't... S1: But that's, I mean, is a feature of certainly of the social technologies and social media that we have, which is that people can now radically be more... Is radically easier to share, and to create content, and to riff on content, which informally we probably always did amongst our friends, but now you can have this culture of producing it and sharing it. 'Cause I, for one, find that exciting. Do you share that? Or... SG: Yeah, I'm amazed at the speed of it. You know, I mean, Beyonce makes a video and then somebody makes an homage to that, and then somebody mocks the homage to that, and somebody does an homage to the mocking of the homage. And it's just like, pffftt, it happens in a day. So I do think that there's a lot of creativity around it. I would... You know, in a lot of ways, a tweet is a new art form. If you can do that in 140 characters, it's like a limerick or it's some other thing that's being invented for us right now. The You Tube video I think has endless possibilities but that's sort of, suddenly, everybody's a film maker. I don't know if you guys... MK: I don't disagree with that because any medium is a mixture of constraint and possibility. That's what a medium is. But I guess, I wonder, wearing my curmudgeon hat, what that does to other kinds of media. You know, McLuhan claimed that the advent of new media didn't destroy old media. It just enwrapped them or encased them. And there was a kind of lines of age on a tree and you could still find... You know, we still find radio when there's television, and we still find television when there's the Internet, and we still find books when there's blogging, and so on. But that's not actually true. There are media that get destroyed. There are forms of expression that are simply obliterated by this march to new forms of creativity. And I like that kind of mash-up and the re-combing the culture as much as the next person, but, I guess, what I wonder is, and I'm only wondering 'cause I think maybe this ship has sailed, that the kinds of things that I spend most of my time reading and thinking about and talking about with my students, they took 10, or 15, or 20 years to produce. MK: You know, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit took him 15 years to write. He thought encapsulated thought. It wasn't 140 characters. It wasn't an idea. It was thought itself. Now maybe that's ridiculous. Maybe that's something that belongs to another era. But if we don't ever even attempt that again, is there never going to be a philosopher again in human history who attempts to encapsulate thought? Well, I mean, if that's the future, that's what we've wrought, and we have to live with it. But I, for one, would think that counts as an impoverishment of human possibility. And, insofar as all the attention goes to what you can do in 140 characters, what room is there left for someone who wants to spend 15 years trying to think what thought is? SG: But has that disappeared? Have we really lost that? MK: Who's gonna publish that book now? SG: Yeah. Can't he self-publish it? [laughter] MK: He will have to self-publish it, yes. SG: Kind of a kick-starter, you know? MK: Yeah. It will be a kick-starter project, that's exactly right. JS: And what I see getting lost is, you know I work for The Globe and Mail, and there are days where Syria gets bumped off the front page 'cause they have a good picture of Lindsay Lohan. I think then you have a really distinct... Somebody's making those editorial choices and somebody's making those editorial choices with an eye to selling papers maybe more than they used to. MK: But, but... Sorry Johanna, just to push the point. It's not just the fact of getting the book published. It's whether the book means anything to anyone except him, whoever, he or she, the Neo-Hegel, the Hegel of the 21st century, maybe in this audience. Because nobody cares about that, it's just another thing among things. It's just another blog post only longer and more boring. That's the problem. It's not that it can't be in the world. There's more stuff in the world now than there ever was. More books are published every year now than in the history of human civilization. It doesn't mean the book is thriving. It means that there is just many more opportunities to express yourself and fewer, and fewer people who care that you do. JS: Are kids still signing up for your class though? Do you have... MK: Oh, sure, yeah. JS: Well, is that not encouraging in and of it... Aren't they interested in reading about Hegel and what you... MK: No, they're interested in hearing about Hegel. They're not interested in reading Hegel. [laughter] SG: Can you sum up Hegel in 140 characters? MK: That's right. S1: So then what's the source of that problem? That's the nugget of the dumbing-down question, right? Is it that there's... That no one is interested in reading in that depth? Is it that there's so much out there that things don't... MK: You know, here's a hypothesis that I think has some traction because it's not value-laden. It's... Because in my curmudgeonly voice I would say, yes, it's dumbing down. But suppose the difference isn't that we were smarter before and we're dumber now and we're getting dumber in the future, it's that we care about different things. So on the analogy to, say, McDonald's versus your local diner that made a hand-crafted hamburger. The McDonald's hamburger is worse from the point of view of someone who cares about the quality of the hamburger. But the convenience, and the uniformity, and the speed of the McDonald's hamburger are values that override any concern about that. So the fact that it's worse is no longer a problem for someone who values the McDonald's hamburger. So from that person's point of view, there's no net loss because that value isn't even in play. I don't really care about the sort of notional possible quality of the hamburger. I care about these other things. MK: And that's where we're going with this. It's the kinds of things that we come to care about are different. So we're not getting dumber, we're getting different. But the things that we no longer care about are the things that some people used to care about, and they thought it made a difference. But those people are disappearing. SG: No, I don't believe that. I mean I don't wanna... It sounds elitist, I guess. MK: It is elitist. That's the whole point. [laughter] Some things are better than other things. SG: Who was reading Hegel in the '50s? MK: Smart people, smarter people are reading Hegel. SG: Okay, and who's reading it now? MK: Smarter people. SG: Yes. [applause] S1: Okay, well let me... SG: I mean, the fact that there are more people reading a wider variety of things, I don't know if that really changes that there's a certain number of people who are reading Hegel, and that people can now access it, and they know about it, and it's available for free online, and they can download it, and... MK: No, it's not a numbers game. It's not a numbers game. It's about whether it matters or not. SG: Yes, but they are the same people who are buying McDonald's one day. There's also the artisanal Kobe beef movement where we all need to have our handmade hammers in the Williamsburg flea market. There are... Don't you find there... MK: Okay, I'm sorry I didn't follow that at all. [laughter] SG: You know, there's a bunch of people... S1: Is Hegel and artisanal cheese, is that... SG: No, not Hegel, the hammer, didn't you say hammers? MK: Yeah. Oh, hamburger, I did say that. SG: That people want the handmade stuff too, it's just these things now can coexist in... Is it possible that we don't have to have a hierarchical model? MK: No. SG: We have to. MK: Well, we have to if we care about valuing things. I mean, this is, I guess, my point, is that everything is now coming down to a level and that's maybe the project that we want. Look, I'm trying to be as neutral as possible about this. I'm a philosophy professor. I'm clearly on the downslope of relevance. [laughter] But I just wanna break a lance for the idea that somethings are actually better than others and more valuable as a result of being better. And the fact that they're still around while all this other stuff is still around, doesn't answer the point. It's whether they matter. And if going forward, they matter and matter less, well, okay, again, that's the future maybe we've wrought, and maybe that's what we wanted when we democratized everything. But it's a net loss in global historical terms. In terms of the history of civilization, that's a net loss. S1: But is it, I mean is it... Does that get back to the idea that it was ever thus? I mean was it really that different in Ray Bradbury's time in the 1950s? Did Hegel matter to those people in that way? MK: Sorry, I'm dominating this. So I just wanna say the one last thing. I think by the middle of the 20th century, that the contours of our current situation were already clear. And the technological changes since 1957 and now are less important than the fact that there was this... The idea of mass culture, mass cult as Dwight Macdonald himself called it, came to dominate. So we're still working out the logic of that. It is certainly different if you go back 100 years or 200 years before that. S1: One of the things that really struck me about the book as I was reading it is that the way that Bradbury depicts our media saturation as getting in the way of our relationship to nature. And I think that, for me, was very resonant, partly, because we spend so much time looking at our phones or whatever or else nature becomes something that we fetishize by going to the farmer's market on the weekends or seeking out our artisanal beef. Did that resonate for anybody else, that idea the disconnect from nature, the alienation from nature that maybe we feel now? [pause] SG: You wanna take this? S1: That's just me, I guess. [laughter] JS: No it is... I think maybe this is one of the weaknesses in the book that we were talking about. That there is... Suddenly, they need to escape and it's not just the city that they need to escape, it's that they need to sort of just get outside and look at a flower. I don't think that that is gonna solve the kind of problems that we're talking about here. I mean, I think that everybody can sort of still agree that the mountains are great and the flowers are great and stuff. It's in our kind of... It's this information overload. The information processing, the information hierarchy is what you're talking about, that I think is trickier. Don't you think? S1: Yeah. I think I was thinking about it not so much in a valuing of the mountains are great, but in that sense of actually of a more spiritual connection with nature in that sense. JS: What was interesting, I think, in that is that what he equated nature with I think was a kind of stillness. And this is what you're talking about a little bit. The time where nothing else is coming in, that you're sitting doing nothing. I read something, God knows where, that if you sit and look in a limitless horizon, it actually releases endorphins in your body. And that kind of thing, that moment of contemplation, that all the time that we need to sit and think about something and let thoughts enter your head. The fact that we won't allow our children to be bored, that you have to buy a minivan that has a TV set in it or that you have to have an iPod on all the time. I look at kids on airplanes now and they're hooked up in 10 different ways. They're never allowed to just sort of sit and look out the window with their own thoughts. And that is where I think, "Does anybody just lie on the grass and stare at the sky anymore?" That is the question that I think is a valuable one. SG: I was wondering whenever you read the book, if it wasn't just sort of an attempt to gauge with critique of industrialization and kind of try to bring that into the book? It seems that at the end, he encounters these different people who present slightly different versions of the argument against mass media and hyper-commercialization, and the fire chief is one, and favours the other, and the people he encounters in nature, outside of town as well. So I was a little bit confused about what he was trying to say about that. But it did stand out, but I just am not sure. S1: Yeah. No, when you... I guess, I'm getting to an age where I worry about the next generation and because you research children's cultural practises, I wonder if you have... Are there things that you notice about their ability to do that kind of thing, to lie in the grass? Or... SG: Yeah, or space for them to do that? S1: Yeah. SG: Yeah. It's definitely something that's lacking in a lot of children's lives, children who live in the city and children who live in the suburbs as well, lack of opportunity to be in outdoor spaces and a lack of any opportunity to be unsupervised in outdoor spaces. So, this idea of just lying in the grass is definitely something that a lot of kids in, again, Western privileged context and underprivileged context, are not experiencing very often. JS: Well, the devaluing of boredom. MK: Yeah. JS: You know boredom is incredibly useful and it gives you that little fallow period in which you launch into the next thing. Without that period of boredom, how do you know who you are? I really feel like, it's sort of in sitting staring out the car window on thousands of family car trips that I became me. You know what I mean? And where is that? Is it just in what you like, like, like, like? That's... MK: I think the boredom point is great because it reminds me of Adam Phillips, the psychoanalyst, who defined boredom as the paradoxical wish for a desire. Which is a great way to put it because it's sort of highlights the fact that what's lacking is the desire and what's not lacking is the desire for desire. And it's in that structure of first and second order that, that person head resides. And so, we try to fill in the first order desire. If I lack one at a given moment, I try to somehow fill in that lack. But it's that lack that is where the questions are asked. I can't vouch for this personally, but a colleague of mine has told me that when he lived in Berlin in the U-Bahn, the underground, there was a sign that showed a commuter who was sort of staring out the window, staring off into space and the German caption was, [German] which means boredom is the wellspring of philosophers. [laughter] MK: The best philosophy seminar is the bus window, right? You're just, sort of, "Why am I here? Why do I have no desires? What is is to have a desire? Who am I? What's going on? When do we get to Syracuse?" But yeah, I'm with you, Johanna, that was my childhood philosophy tutorial was those long car trips and no screen in front of my face. S1: I wanted some time and space for questions and comments, so just maybe at the end, I'll ask all three of you, is there a way that we can continue to, if not embrace them, swim in the media world that we live in while protecting the self for that quiet space of reflection? Are those things capable of being balanced? JS: I think it's just a question of not allowing, like I was doing today, not allowing yourself to become too caught up in it. And that is a matter of discipline and I think also education. I think that you have to, you know, this is what they go to university for. I think you're just sort of stripped down to your nub. You are taught that every thought you ever had, someone had better than you millions of times before. And there's something in that kind of stripping you down to where you start again. And I think the only way to do that is through not letting yourself be overwhelmed all the time by all this stuff. And that is just a matter of rigour, and I know that's a lot easier said than done. But limiting the amount of time that you're swimming in the gook. You can't ignore it, but you can try to stay out of it sometimes. SG: Huh? Same question? 46:25 S1: Yeah. SG: Yeah. That's a very good answer, I mean, looking for the balance and giving yourself space and saying to yourself that it's okay to not be connected. I guess, one of the big problems that my students talk to me about is feeling like they have to be, there's peer pressure, but also a sense that employers are gonna expect them to have an online profile. And in my class they have to join the Facebook group and there's this feeling that, it's never okay to be disconnected. So this idea of not having a cellphone would be not even a possibility. But introducing that and giving yourself freedom and permission, I guess, to turn it off. MK: The only thing... I think that is very good. The only thing I would add is maybe the most important, to my mind, about media and technology, generally, is to resist the easy and, in fact, nonsensical idea that technology is neutral, or that media are neutral, we can use them for good or for bad. Every technology, every medium has tendencies. It has constraints and limits that make it tendentious. It allows certain things but not others. And every time somebody says, "Oh, Twitter is neutral. Facebook is neutral. It could be the air of Spring. It could be sending photos of date rape." No, that those things are true, but that doesn't make it neutral. And the most important thing is to be critical about the media that we engage in at that level. And, absolutely, resist and shout down, frankly, anybody who says neutral. S1: Okay. Thank you very much to our panelists. [applause] Amusing Ourselves to Death - Apr 8, 2013 - Appel Salon 04/12/13 Page 16 of 17