The Con Air Dilemma
In my lifetime, I'll never get around to reading a fraction of the books I'd like to read. I will probably never develop a true appreciation for visual art. And while I'm familiar with a diverse and wide range of music, there is probably an even larger amount of music that I'll never get to hear. There are hundreds of celebrated movies that I will never get the chance to watch.
But one thing I'm pretty sure of is that I will wind up seeing Con Air about eight times before I die.
I'm not sure what point I'm trying to make, except maybe that I often find it daunting to organize my time and my thoughts efficiently. Even if I could get the harder stuff figured out, like creating a solid routine that enables me to balance my need to generate income, pursue my aspirations, run errands and be healthy, I'm still going to waste too much of my intellectual free space watching Nicolas Cage and Ving Rhames ham it up next to a grounded airplane.
Or wasting 94 minutes of my afternoon in a West LA movie theater watching Catfish. (Spoiler warning--it sucks.) It's a thinly constructed narrative revolving around a long-distance Facebook relationship. The only thing that I'm left trying to figure out is whether the movie is more loathsome as a documentary or as a "fake documentary," the root of this film's marketing hype. That gimmick (asking the public to guess whether the documented story is real or fake) still apparently has the ability to lure suckers like me into the theater, and I can't believe I fell for it with this piece of shit nor can I remember the last time I left a movie theater so annoyed.
***
The main thing that fascinates me about Facebook, though, is that young people will never get to experience the dynamic of NOT being in touch with people from one's childhood. Part of the appeal of Facebook that initially compelled millions of people like me to sign up in their 20s and 30s--the novelty of unexpectedly reuniting with estranged friends and acquaintances from far in the past--is functionally useless for the generations that will use the site from here out.
I realized it was just a novelty: the reason I hadn't spoken to high school acquaintances in over a decade was because our lives had little necessity or opportunity to intersect, and this was a natural thing. Sure, I was interested to get in touch with one or a few people I may have never encountered again if not for Facebook (and there are still one or two important people from my past whom I tried to find unsuccessfully), but I concluded that there was a quiet simplicity to not being in touch with people; a comfort in letting their whereabouts and goings-on remain a mystery; also that running into one of these people randomly on a NYC street was more special than finding ten of them through a social networking platform.
I'm not trying to be cranky, though. I think the existence of the internet has mostly enriched our existence and improved human intelligence and mobility to a significant degree. Social networking is now part of our culture, and there isn't much of a place for my cynicism about how it empowers mindless self-promotion to odious levels. My feeling that Facebook Walls exist primarily to make ex-girlfriends and boyfriends jealous and stalker-ish is also somewhat useless since deleting my account seems to have taken care of that problem.
Facebook is just another aspect of the Con Air Dilemma--diverting our collective attention to a constant stream of mostly meaningless, but easy to absorb, fragments of bullshit--but it's not the overarching problem. Lately, I am just more aware of the double-edged sword of the information age.
I can think of dozens of examples of how the internet has improved my life, especially since I consider things like entertainment and travel to be an integral part of human existence, but my ability to filter out the noise from the quality seems to be deteriorating and that impacts my ability to enjoy solitude, to interact with people in the flesh, to find that ever-elusive balance. And since I still find myself sitting in my chair watching an hour of Con Air in a vegetative state, there is a problem, and it's time to adjust.
But one thing I'm pretty sure of is that I will wind up seeing Con Air about eight times before I die.
I'm not sure what point I'm trying to make, except maybe that I often find it daunting to organize my time and my thoughts efficiently. Even if I could get the harder stuff figured out, like creating a solid routine that enables me to balance my need to generate income, pursue my aspirations, run errands and be healthy, I'm still going to waste too much of my intellectual free space watching Nicolas Cage and Ving Rhames ham it up next to a grounded airplane.
Or wasting 94 minutes of my afternoon in a West LA movie theater watching Catfish. (Spoiler warning--it sucks.) It's a thinly constructed narrative revolving around a long-distance Facebook relationship. The only thing that I'm left trying to figure out is whether the movie is more loathsome as a documentary or as a "fake documentary," the root of this film's marketing hype. That gimmick (asking the public to guess whether the documented story is real or fake) still apparently has the ability to lure suckers like me into the theater, and I can't believe I fell for it with this piece of shit nor can I remember the last time I left a movie theater so annoyed.
***
The main thing that fascinates me about Facebook, though, is that young people will never get to experience the dynamic of NOT being in touch with people from one's childhood. Part of the appeal of Facebook that initially compelled millions of people like me to sign up in their 20s and 30s--the novelty of unexpectedly reuniting with estranged friends and acquaintances from far in the past--is functionally useless for the generations that will use the site from here out.
I realized it was just a novelty: the reason I hadn't spoken to high school acquaintances in over a decade was because our lives had little necessity or opportunity to intersect, and this was a natural thing. Sure, I was interested to get in touch with one or a few people I may have never encountered again if not for Facebook (and there are still one or two important people from my past whom I tried to find unsuccessfully), but I concluded that there was a quiet simplicity to not being in touch with people; a comfort in letting their whereabouts and goings-on remain a mystery; also that running into one of these people randomly on a NYC street was more special than finding ten of them through a social networking platform.
I'm not trying to be cranky, though. I think the existence of the internet has mostly enriched our existence and improved human intelligence and mobility to a significant degree. Social networking is now part of our culture, and there isn't much of a place for my cynicism about how it empowers mindless self-promotion to odious levels. My feeling that Facebook Walls exist primarily to make ex-girlfriends and boyfriends jealous and stalker-ish is also somewhat useless since deleting my account seems to have taken care of that problem.
Facebook is just another aspect of the Con Air Dilemma--diverting our collective attention to a constant stream of mostly meaningless, but easy to absorb, fragments of bullshit--but it's not the overarching problem. Lately, I am just more aware of the double-edged sword of the information age.
I can think of dozens of examples of how the internet has improved my life, especially since I consider things like entertainment and travel to be an integral part of human existence, but my ability to filter out the noise from the quality seems to be deteriorating and that impacts my ability to enjoy solitude, to interact with people in the flesh, to find that ever-elusive balance. And since I still find myself sitting in my chair watching an hour of Con Air in a vegetative state, there is a problem, and it's time to adjust.
posted by Shane Schleger at 10:06 AM
11 comments
