Media Deprivation

“The more you drive the, less intelligent you become.” –Tracey Walter

The last movie I watched before my day of media celibacy was Repo Man, directed by Alex Cox in 1984. It is easily the best movie that was ever created; the quote above is from a monologue in the movie. I thought about that line a lot, as I drove, with no music in my car.
The first pang of missing media was in the car as I drove quietly. Thinking. The world I live in requires me to drive. To survive I have to go to work, to school, to lots of places. None of these places are near each other, and where I live is nowhere near any of them. So that’s why I have a car. As I drove to the hum and clicks of my aging automobile, I wonder, what came first: people making places of importance so far away from each other, so then we needed to invent cars? Or that we invented cars so now we could start putting stuff farther and farther away from each other. Either way, society now has commutes and people are now commuters, and something must fill the time during the commute. So the medium of radio is the perfect fit for the automobile. It’s something to occupy the minds of all the people who sit alone in their cars for hours a day. It makes the absurd notion, that people are willing to sit and drive for hours alone, bearable. Do I depend on media when I drive? Yes. But do I need it? Maybe not. I did a lot of thinking while I drove in the silence, for this paper, and for other homework and different things. I don’t get that much thinking done when I drive with music. If we all thought a little bit more, and rocked out a little bit less, I wonder if America would be a better place.
The very next thing that hit me with my media deprivation was my dependence on electronic entertainment. As I sat and read Dead Eye Dick by Kurt Vonnegut, the black face of my television stared at me, beckoning me to play. I had to read in the kitchen. Again I sat and did more thinking. Did people have so much time on their hands that they invented games to play? Or did they discover the fun of games and then start doing everything else less? I can so easily get sucked into a video game. The story, the strategy, the game play, the fun, all of it together really engrosses me. With out them, there is only me. And I’m pretty boring, I really when ripped away from my media I really understood what Jib Fowles talks about in chapter 25 when he says “City folk were along in ways more profound than country folk had ever experienced”
Another big part of feeling alone or detached is that without my phone or my laptop, I was cut off from my constant stream of information. No texts told me where my friends were or what they were doing. No blogs to tell me about the world or about what new developments were happening in politics or technology. No updates on the recent video game releases. That last one gets me the most. I felt that I was out of the “conversation.” The idea of The Conversation, or Resonance would be the Postman way to say it, I realized must not have existed to a media-less people. That’s probably because the idea is a little silly anyway. All the chatter and all the talking to nobody, all the blogs and threads and articles and posts that somehow adds up to a big giant conversation. A conversation is 2 or more people talking to each other, yet most of the internet conversation is not people directly talking to each other, though there are way more than two of them. I suppose I wasn’t really in this Conversation to begin with, I don’t contribute in anyway, I just read all the blogs and watch all the videos and that makes me feel apart of something bigger than myself, something that many others are apart of too. But without my laptop, I’m completely missing all of it.
I’m so used to feeling “connected” though I am not literally connected to anyone or anything with my phone or computer, but I’ve thought about my self as being connected for so long, its weird to be un-connected. I wonder how long it would talk for me stop thinking in those terms, to stop equating wi-fi single or Internet access with being connected to the world. It’s almost like a 6th sense, the sense of being connected, being able to experience reality with more than site and smell and taste and such. Does all this connectivity bring people together? Or is it making up for that fact that it made so atomized to begin with. I think a little of both, people don’t like to be alone, but modern life and technology make it so easy and often times necessary to be alone (like the commute). But new ways to talk open up and people take more and more advantage of them as the technology that once pulled us apart can now bring us back together.