Technology Killed the Engaged Listening Star
Okay… I am playing off a certain song by The Buggles. Seriously, however, technology has most certainly made us the most passive information consumers—we don’t even necessarily have to be awake to receive it by our “I-can-do-everything” tracks-everything, super-mega, hyper-cool communication devices. We’re tuned in, turned on, and connected twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. Technology and its ability to grant access have allowed everything in our lives to become overwhelming oversaturated. We reblog. We retweet. We re-post.
We hear the songs played over and over again on Last.fm, run to Hype Machine to download the “sample tracks” to our heart’s content, and then fail to buy the album and really suss out the details of the lyrics.
We follow dozen of people on Tumblr—most of whom simply recycle the same old posts over and over—but do we ever take the time to read the sometimes exceptionally long or beautifully original posts from Roger Ebert? Or the random blogger we found by accident?
Twitter has conditioned us to hang on the value of the anecdote and the link. Do the majority of us actually click through to read the full story or have we defaulted to Tim Ferriss’s “low information diet” tactic of subsisting on the headlines alone?
If we’re working towards consuming more “quality” in less time, is the consumption itself even worth it? Are we ever truly listening—whether it be to a song, a story, or a moment expressed as an image?
You listen to the words being said, but do you hear what is being said?
Does Commodity Status Equal Fast Food Status?
Our attention spans have become hyperactive in recent years and why not? Whatever and whomever has the best headline/pitch/slogan wins our attention -even if it’s just for ten seconds- and we have platforms that encourage this kind of promiscuous social behavior: Twitter, Facebook, Hype Machine, Digg, and everything else. But when does this become too much?
I subscribe to a number of RSS feeds through Google Reader and I’ll admit that sometimes I don’t want to take the time to read every post because 1) I’ve become conditioned to multi-tasking and “productivity”, and 2) There are usually a TON of updates to go through because so many people post little snippets five times a day. I’ve had a couple of days in the last few months where there is so much to read through that I simply hit the “Mark All As Read” button -comparable to committing email bankruptcy. I recently opened up the “Trends” section in my reader and noticed that it tracks not only how often and specifically when the blogs you read update, but it also tracks when, how often, and how much of each blog you actually read. A lot of the low-scoring blogs for me belong to writers that post too much -either too many little snippets on a daily basis or too many epically sized posts in the course of a day or week. Too much and too often = burnout.
This has happened not just with blogs, but also with Twitter, with music, with everything. The TED conference and it’s many, many TEDx spin-offs are a prime example of over-saturation. While I will not disagree that TED has inspired conversation and perhaps a grassroots movement to reconnect for positive change, I wonder about the quality of what we give and get from it now. When something becomes a commodity, does it take on fast food status?
In this age where we have become so focused on the “headline”, the idea of “less is more” has lost its integrity. Yes, we may pack a lot of punch into tiny packages that we deliver, but when we oversaturate with too many of these little anecdotes they lose their frisson.
Something has happened. Do we even know it has happened? We look out from inside our brains. We notice differences in things. But how can we notice a difference in the brains that are noticing them? One reason meaningless celebrities dominate all of our national media is that they are meaningless. They require no study, no reading, no thought. OMG! Heidi is leaving Spencer! OMG! Russell Brand is a sex addict! OMG! Matt Lauer never dated or slept with Alexis Houston, and all that time he didn’t know Alexis was a man! OMG! Top Kill has failed! WTF. ROFL.
Roger Ebert in his post, “The Quest For Frisson”
I can say only this: I have been swept away in my own search for frisson this week -whether it be in the search for my latest digital fascination or rather on the yoga mat out in the sunlight of the summer- and that is why there is no major post this Wednesday.
Perhaps we all need to go out and create our own frissons once in a while instead of basking in the isolation of our computer screens.
