Eternal Summertime of the Media Landscape

“In energetic minds truth soon changes
by domestication into power.”

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Hype. Who does it work on, and why?

How artificial is it — or does it have to be so at all? Perhaps it can be a genuine expression of wanting to communicate something great that everyone deserves to hear about. The pre-launch acclaim that enveloped The Dark Knight certainly stood out that way, yet some people just took it as hype. Cynics.

Cynics? Just what are they?

We’ll get back to them, whatever they are. Meanwhile, let’s crossbreed Avatar with hype and see if we get a thalidomide baby or a pearly cherub. (Or a pearly thalidomide cherub.)

This film was announced almost a decade and a half ago. Cameron wrote the script in ’95 — & knowing his modus operandi he probably hadn’t revised it since. I’ll be upfront here. As far as I’m concerned, he’s only made 2½ good films. The original Terminator and True Lies, one of the best ever remakes of a French film (& The Terminator ripped off half the ’50s science fiction authors, including Philip K. Dick). And Aliens is entertaining the first coupla times, even if it’s dumber than Starship Troopers. I’ve met only one person who despises James Cameron more than I — and he’s a real film lover, not an indulger; he’s not permissive, in the way fanboys are, who only care about enjoying as much as they can, no matter how shitty it is. (Are fanboys the deformed mutant offspring of Hippies…?)

It’s now Australia Day and I still haven’t seen Avatar. I will see it … but I just haven’t been bothered yet. Ahead of it in the queue is The Lovely Bones and Sherlock Holmes, Inglourious Basterds, Where the Wild Things Are … hell, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs looks more solid. In other words, I’m fully expecting Avatar to be entertaining and moronic (if not in equal measure).

But it offends me how that it’s “OK” for Avatar to be entertaining AND moronic … since it’s an SF film. —It’s only to be expected. (There’s been a decades’-long confusion between the words “science fiction” and “adventure story”, so that 99% of audiences presume they’re exact synonyms. Olaf Stapledon is what SF should be, not james fkn Cameron. If you wanted to see SF last year, you’d’ve seen District 9 and Moon.)

Perhaps if I was 10 years old I’d treat Abatar like Star Wars. (God forbid.)

A passing thought about hype, though: The Beatles and Hype.…

The Beatles was just about the last time that music had such quality that it appealed universally, across the span of cultures and generations without the need for hype (well, as much as anyone ever had: Charlie Chaplin accomplished something similar; to some extent Jackie Chan has emulated him). Yet The Beatles helped create Youth Culture in the form that it’s since exploded from. And kept exploding, everyone exploring every personal variation of niche, subgenre after subgenre, so that it’s now impossible for any one single band to appeal to any large fraction of the music-buying audience. I remember some record-breaking antics by Elton John at the height of his fame in the 70s, when he SOLD SO MANY ALBUMS HE HIMSELF ACCOUNTED FOR … almost 2% of record sales.

Anyway, people now, in some way, probably long for “events” that can transcend cultural subdivisions and appeal to everyone as a universal experience, something we all know each other to be participating in, like listening to the Hottest 100 countdown on Australia Day … there’s a prosthetic sense of participation in the national community … something that cuts across boundaries and allows us to believe we’re more alike than we’re different.

Social utilities like MySpace aren’t really about setting up private utopias where everything is set exactly how the user wants it, down to the last whim. MySpace is really all about OurExperience. The more we isolate ourselves, the more desperate we become to allow something to just be *grand* and connect to us all.

That French theoretician Lyotard identified what he called “the Grand Narratives” of culture. One example was The Enlightenment; others would be Christianity, Marxism and, presumably, Consumerism. (…& Postmodernists see their main job as breaking down hope in any Grand Narrative by deconstructing everything in sight until there’s nothing left to build with. But don’t call them nihilists.)

The conduit of hype is what facilitates this latent wish-fulfilment for a Grand Narrative of connection with your fellow citizen. The Dark Knight managed it big time. Like a colossus it strode over the landscape and squashed everything else flat, and it was all that people would talk about. (Okay, one exaggerates for effect but personally I had one of my more remarkable film-going experiences ever. 400 rigidly quiet people too tense to eat the munchies they’d bought, so enveloped in a grip of terrorism that it felt like a trauma-flashback to September 11. Share and share alike.)

Us poor animals, us dumb homo sapiens, we do wanna connect, share, believe we’re all still the same types of humans, even as we refine sharper and sharper distinctions for saying “…nope, not quite” to more and more people. (Believe me, I’m the last one to be immune to this. Living in an apartment promotes isolation faster than anything. Not even the internet’s enough to fool me into feeling connected.)

Now. Picture someone cynical. Someone cynical of people who boast about things they can’t deliver on, or cynical of the ideological propaganda put about by government and business spin-doctors. But someone who’s not cynical about the products churned out en masse by popular consumer culture.

This someone is always covertly rooting for the coming of “Hit Season”, hoping the latest seasonal releases will deliver something mighty and heroic, something “big scale” to create a sense of “epoch” — that we live in “big times”, with “big things” happening.

That someone could be me. I grew up in the era when Star Wars first went large. Its Coming (its release should always be referred to in capitals, akin to a Second Coming) swept existing pop culture flat and replaced it with something else, something new. Sure, teen pop culture existed before that, thanks to James Dean and the Big Bopper and Elvis’s tight pants. But Star Wars was the single event that made teen culture a gigabuck niche market and created a new spending class — kids with money or the leverage on their parents to extract money. In the era of Avatar, Lord of the Rings, Shrek, Transformers, few kids today would believe how much our entertainment culture devolves straight from the innovations brought about by Star Wars. (And today on the web you can find how many thousands of passing niches in the Star Wars mythos have been explored and expanded by legions of fans since, no doubt taking over their lives. But you have to wonder how many are not kids but 30 – 50 year-olds?)

Star Wars didn’t just usher in action figures, die-cast toys, video arcades and play stations. Everything seemed to spin out from it. Before 1977, brand name tennis shoes were just so … “meh”. Now try being taken seriously without a pair of Nike (insert brand name of choice here). Instead of hero worshipping Han Solo we worship what kind of shoes he might’ve worn. Sects have sprung up speculating in wake of this.

Does reified Hero Worship like this have the effect of making people not want to grow old, per se? “Youth culture” now seems to last up to any age — there are 60-year-old skaterboys cranking around with their backwards caps firmly tugged back over their balding chrome domes. What’s the mechanism by which youth culture has so extended its appeal — is it simply a case of arrested development?
2010’s Aussie of the Year is mental health expert Professor Patrick McGorry. He talks about how “adulthood” now spans a longer period of time than ever. Also, that 75% of mental health cases crop up before age 25. Well, surely it’s no coincidence that our brains only finish developing around age 25, as is the medical consensus now. As is the finding that the more alcohol gets in your system before that age, the more it permanently fucks up your basic brain development. Including emotional development, natch. Throw all that in, along with all the cultural influences to prize childlike things above everything else (children are the least discriminating consumers), and yeah, you don’t wanna grow up, you wanna enjoy being young forever, it’s an eternal summer you’ll never have again soon as you let it slip from your fingertips so hang on for dear life — infantilize! infantilize!

Let’s go back to our hypothetical cynic.

Someone who grows up in this climate is hardly likely to critique it, is he? Do we critique the air we breathe, lobby for 21% oxygen, not 20.946? Cynics motivated the blowtorch the pretensions of egoists are outwardly motivated, even when they’re guided by a sure sense of their principles. Their fuel comes from the fuck-ups and hypocrisies of the outside world. Cynics don’t need to be introspective, in the constantly-analysing-one’s-emotions sense, like a Goth or Emo. (Or even philosophers….) Maybe, in this cultural climate, even a cynic can grow up without an inner critic shaping oneself, never developing an editor for his vociferous outbursts, just always giving himself permission to slag off at anything that doesn’t please him at the moment. But what’s the efficacy of a critical voice that has no or hazily defined guiding principles? (Apart from entertainment value, but that’s a separate issue just for now.) The media landscape we grow up in today is all about permissiveness. You’re even allowed to be angry. In fact, so long as you’re emotional and nothing else, that’s okay, anything goes. Critical reason is the enemy here. Scepticism is the enemy. Just keep on doing things the way you’ve always learnt to do them; do what’s “natural” to you; learn things in an ad hoc way, if that’s what works for you. Anything so long as you don’t evolve a consistent internal critic.

Australians talk a good game about being sceptical, but we rarely seem to remember to apply it to the things we love most — our mass culture junk, our media and entertainment. Well, we’re only human. (That’s always the answer, in the end. And a reliable defence for anyone who never wants anything to change. Like reality.)

Let’s not forget our hypothetical cynic. As often as he slags off Kevin Rudd for failing to actually do anything, he’ll go out and buy a tag hauer watch, or a new pair of trainers. He believes in things. (Things don’t lie, do they? Have people now internalized labels and brands that they perceive them as things, as objects...?) Such belief doesn’t require qualification, a response edited in line with anything other than an endorphin rush. Not a skerrick of cynicism in sight about the behaviour of such shopping mechanisms that clog our shopping centres (sorry, “malls”: mustn’t forget to use the proper Americanism here). No scepticism for this cynic, just going for the benefits of the product, straight up. Sometimes Ray Bans or Guccis have a social utility that outweighs their raw materials for jokes about wankers (especially when impressionable girls are around). So our cynic is selective about when he’s critical, even when he doesn’t think he is. (In other words he was human, all-too-human.)
But if we do this kind of thing anyway, we might as well take charge and do it knowingly, with some kinda principles consciously in mind, or at least serving as entrained instincts. It’s one way not to get sucked in by whatever passing fad. One’s still free to enjoy youth culture as long as you want, but you get to enjoy the difference between junk (Avatar, Star Trek 11 and Twilight) and gold (Dark Knight, District 9 and Tropic Thunder).

But when people grow up too intimately immersed in the media landscape, how can anyone gain the perspective to be able to discriminate? Close up, everything looks like everything else. The truest symptom to identifying fanboys is their inability to tell the difference between what’s good and what’s shit.* They think anything they like is by definition good.

Western societies today seem to be splitting up into subgroups with more and more specialized etiquette rules for entry, with less and less overlap with other existing groups. Social reward is gained by giving 1000% loyalty to your friendship group’s fixation for collecting belt buckles. Complete immersion in the rules of your group and your group only. Who cares how embarrassing others find you — who needs others when you’ve got belt buckles?

In one sense, people raised in the media landscape grow up quicker than those raised in the country. Culture evolves quicker in the hothouse machines of cities. The countryside is still ruled by the pace of physical travel, the influence of neighbours rather than broadband connection speeds. (This, too, is changing. What will mass connectivity to the world wide web do to the sense of time of kids growing up in the outback? Will they have to learn to exist in two simultaneous timeframes? Just how good is sanity at coping with that anyway? Lotsa luck.)

But perhaps kids don’t objectively grow up quicker in the cities than the country. Perhaps it’s a case of which landscape you’re acclimatized to. There’s more than one way to mature to adulthood.

And perhaps, too, it makes sense to speak of Media Natives and Media Immigrants. No prizes for guessing which group grew up where.

Our hypothetical cynic grew up a Media Native. He had TVs and transistor radios and pinball machines and drive-in cinemas from an early age. He was able to take their effects for granted because his brain was hewn into shape by ads and cartoons from the earliest age; the kid who grows up in the country has nowhere near as much bombardment, so by the time he immigrates into the city, the media product hits him all the more, has a disproportionately strong influence. But really, who’s more mature? Drop the city kid in a country town and can he juryrig a bung machine or saddle a horse? I know I couldn’t. self-reliance is a good a criterion for maturity as any, and if there’s one thing cities are good at, it’s making us think ew need to depend on a whole host of things. How can I live without my morning frapaccino…?
In my experience people from the country mature quicker. Two basic reasons at least, if not three. For one, living in the country means working. Working hard. Survival issues are that much closer to your face. And the other: in a sense cities are giant industrialized wombs — machines for keeping us safe from life. A lot of us are dependent on cities. We lack the self-reliance to survive without them. If the industrialized city magically broke down overnight, untold thousands would not be able to adapt to living off the land. Almost half of industrialized humans are now symbionts with the technological environment of the city. They are the outer reaches of our own bodies. We are no longer encapsulated by our skins. We retain a dependency to the extent that we acquire literacy of the media city.

A third way in which country people may enjoy a more genuine maturity than their city counterparts is that natives of the countryside simply have less distractions in reified forms. They have less objects to obsess about. Even in the outback there is life, life and more life. The organic is the frame of existence. Try saying that for a city, where “a park” is a flat, near tree-less rectangle of green between four busy streets. In cities, organicity is near surreal. (No wonder we’re willing to drive such long distances on long weekends.) Surrounded by things – living within things as one’s milieu – us cityfolk find it easier to compartmentalize, to objectify. And it’s people we objectify. This seems to occur in proportion to population size. Melburnians are that much more insular and aloof than Sandgropers. But Sydneysiders are far worse still, hostile and paranoid about casual greetings from strangers, always so busy with their own mighty concerns that they can’t acknowledge hellos from passers-by without having a panic attack or pulling a gun “in self-defence”. In the country, people still register perceptually as people. It’s all that organic stuff around them reminding them where they came from. So one can conclude they are comparitively more grounded in human affairs. Less prone to fetishizing things. Collecting bottle caps and mounting them on walls. Polishing one’s car every second arvo. Hiring DVDs by the score rather than going to the flicks, or to see plays. Getting in another few levels on your X-box rather than going to the pub to shoot pool. It could be said that country people are more prepared to have genuine social interactions, even in passing, even with strangers. (In practice, because of the smaller numbers of country folk overall, there’s a more limited social repertoire available. You just can’t win….)

All in all, country people enjoy a different basis in which they are grounded. But cities are great levellers and make “Natives” of us all, once you join. Chris Dickinson always thought that cities came to exist as means for distracting people from the certain knowledge of impending death. We huddle together for reassurance against this true knowledge. Cities as Denial Machines. Cities, even when they drown us in torrential sub-cultures and sporting codes, make us forget to be anthropological. We psychically annul our beast origins and anoint ourselves forever closer to angels. …Perhaps this magical carrot that the safety of cities extends to us is what allows us to feel like wanting to stay young forever.

Not that that’s a consciously stated goal. Also, if the charge of reification was ever brought up, Media Natives would flat out deny it, and point out that they too prefer to see their friends face to face rather than SMS them. It’s just that iPhones and webcams give them the opportunity for more frequent, fluid socialization. That’s the goal. In fact, it could easily be said that city people are now hypersocialized. After all, media exists only to link people, to immerse them in as many communicative possibilities as their minds could stand. This is the advantage the Media Native has over the country kid who has to immigrate into city-phenomenology, for the principle driver of evolution in cities is not technology per se but communication. The spread of change, of ideas, of influences … of friendships and loves.

And their maturation may be taking place faster than any culture in history. It may legitimately be a question of a different order of maturity, a different kind of maturity than we have historically defined it. Meaningful comparisons may no longer be possible. Instead, everyone requires literacy in the local communicative environment they find themselves in. I certainly have no delusions about being able to “talk country” — they’d have me pegged I a minute, and take the piss accordingly.
Perhaps there is no maybe about it. It just is what it is. The human race is smearing psychologically, existentially, emotionally. Our soul has exploded out through the hypermedia prism of our numerous and increasingly numerous communicative technologies, rays all shooting outwards, not at parallel angles. We may never meet again. You will know us by our red shift … but that may be all that you learn about us.
There may not be one humanity left before long, but a human spectra.




* (Which brings us back to that old philosophical quandary: Can God create a nerd so socially spazzed out that He cannot find him a girlfriend…?)