Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Click! I Quit!

More. Faster. Louder. More. More. Faster. Louder. More.

We have become contracted in our way of life. We are a jump cut society. Our discourse is truncated yet louder. Our visual stimulation must be more rapid or we tire and change the source. Thoughts come and go.

Five of the seven words you can’t say on TV have been said on network TV. The most violent thoughts, the most criminal behavior are a part of our children’s daily entertainment.

Having grown up playing video games, or not, is the defining factor of existence.

More violence. More greed. Sold to us, packaged and sold by those who believe in its reality, in its necessity. And each one who comes after believes that the way to success is to be more than what came before. To be faster. To be louder than what came before.

The number of boxes on a screen we are able to watch at any one time, indeed, the number of screen themselves, grows in inverse proportion to the number of paragraphs we can absorb at any one sitting. Watch your TV. Look at your magazines.

The internet has taught us that we no longer have to read anything more than 800 words. It has exposed our failure to have taught people to read, while at the same time has caused more people to type than ever before. Typing is not writing. You’re is different from your.

The President shouts at us, while three-word slogans repeat on the wall behind him, over and over, the simple message he cannot put into words. No one ever finishes a sentence on interview shows. Smugness reigns, and I sit on the bus, watching it pick up speed with no one at the wheel.

More. Faster. Louder. More. More. Faster. Louder. More.

Does anyone who is responsible for these things ever use these things? I mean, ulitimately responsible. The poor fools do. Not the buyers, but the fools making the things that go faster, louder, more profane, more violent, and which ignore basic human values. And more fools line up every day, confident in their belief that if they just made more of what already exists faster, and louder, that they can have more of what somebody else just made faster and louder and more.

Sex, music, politics, TV, movies. More. Faster. Louder. More. Can you top this? Can you take it further? If I just sat down and thought of the worst thing in the world, people would buy it. If I just made it a little bit more gross, a little bit more violent, a little faster, a little more. Just a little more.

How far over the top can you go before you fall off the edge? How edgy can you be before the edge becomes so thin, it disappears? How self-referential can you be before all of existence becomes a weblog and you spend your whole life documenting each and every moment as it happens?

I am infected with it. I can’t even finish writing this. I am bored by my own thoughts.

This also appears on huffingtonpost.com

No comments: