BOREDOM-PHOBIA IN THE DIGITAL AGE
A decade ago, I could have said that the internet was an online data source for public information, hosting global communication and streaming services; I understood the internet as an impartial output source,
But in recent years my evolving awareness of the naivety of this outlook has intensified. As a Gen-Z having exited a pre-social-media-crazed world from infancy, it is the sincerest disillusionment to realise that “every moment, every element of one’s life…is fodder for instant affirmation”.
Self-oppression is Big Brother’s ultimate tool.
We have learned to perform “exhaustive unwaged digital labour” for a virtual reality that trumps in recognition and value the physical lived experience (Kornbluh). Such concerns are perpetually at the forefront of my scorn toward the online media sphere, but after reading Anna Kornbluh and Mark Fisher’s confirmation on the topic, it is that much more disheartening.
CONTENT AND CONSUMPTION
Increasingly since the rise of fake news and artificial intelligence, the internet has become a perpetually biased information basis that disguises mass information control under the euphemism of ‘tailored individualistic content’, artfully feigning a holistic scope of transparency in a dereliction of mediating duty.
And the effect is pervasive; institutions have stopped selecting, educating and challenging audiences and instead have optimised their media for circulation, engagement and affective immediacy. Online platforms seem now to only ever be interested in what circulates most effectively, rather than asking what is worth mediating.
So how do we navigate media as individuals?
While we sit prodding numbly at our screens, what is left for the imagination? At the tips of our fingers lies a perpetual state of discontent; we are given everything imaginable, yet still sit searching for something that is not a facet of the auto-scroll agenda.
UNIQUENESS VS REALNESS
In the oversaturated digital environment of today I find myself constantly answering to the homogeneity of high paced trend culture with monotonous indistinction, where uniqueness of individual expression is a highly sought-after asset yet is invariably extinct in the landscape of furnished infrastructure where everyone seems to be having the same, relatable individual experiences.
So herein lies the concern that most in the digital age now cripplingly fear: how do we make ourselves authentic and relatable at the same time when the two qualities directly oppose each other’s demands?
It seems everyone is trying to achieve this intangible goal but has, as a consequence, overlooked the question of when did we allow these two oxymorons to become inextricable in the dominant values of Western culture?
QUALITY TO QUANTITY
This value shift from qualitative to quantitative measuring is what I came across in Kornbluh’s book, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism, as “instantification” - the modern kryptonite for a generation of chronic consumers.
With instantification, we find that speed replaces intent in the algorithm’s value system, alongside “surging” streaming culture that explains why digital media feels overwhelming but empty; more circulation does not produce more meaning. So while the cycles of modern digital trends seem never ending, it is even more imperative to decide on the ‘what’ in content creation and consumption.
Every day we are breastfed sterilised content pumped with oversaturated ‘realness’ with a side of political corruption…so what's the solution? Trad-wife over to organic?
But what would this entail? Unplugging completely is certain social suicide - if you’re not Linked-In you’re not clued up - so while the CDC threatens the effects of raw milk, we continue to live perpetually wired into the mainframe.
THE DECLINING VALUE OF CREATIVITY AGAINST THE FINANCESPHERE
When I am asked about the creative industries and the worth of art, I am reminded of the banana…Maurizio Cattelan’s ‘Comedian’; if a banana duct taped to a wall can hold a value of up to $6.2 million, how do we define the worth of art? In modern day, we grieve the lost art of true art itself - but the word is obsolete.
Art no longer holds the same weight; creativity is discounted as a side line infrastructure of vocational progress. (I side-eye begrudgingly at the finance bros while waving my BA white flag.) In a technologically branded age of hyper-individualism, art is a decorative and unemployable inconsistent.
This begs the question: when we cannot define the worth of our art, how do we define the worth of ourselves?
So what is the new value to fuel our digital world? The answer is, as Kornbluh proclaims, “presence”, as the work of art itself. With the rise of commodification culture, the new variable of measurement has become our presence and participation; we are the new renewable energy source to measure the value of our own commodification.
PARTICIPATION AND PARTIAL ATTENTION CULTURE
Where traditionally art is a passive form of expression, post-postmodernism and latterly, metamodernism explores interaction and participation as an active and vital form of contemporary engagement with art.
Today we are able to experience the experience of art so much more than ever before; we are provided a palette amply diverse in sensations - 4D cinema, VR headsets, and “vanGoghas” alike. However, reflectively, this begs the question: how prominent is our necessity for hyperstimulation in order to engage anymore?
Another notable mention as a creature of early internet culture is Mark Fisher, whom I came across in my studies of his book, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative.
Fisher delineates an early theory of ‘platform interactivity’; votes, likes, reviews - and other such engagement metrics - create the perception of empowerment while folding us into a system of measurement and control; we ‘participate’, but participation becomes the mechanism of governance.
Self-imposed surveillance syndrome is a term I’ll coin to describe this, which lends to the culture of digital voyeurism that is imposed within social media. When we look at the first major happenings of this phenomenon, we can turn to “Big Brother” to illustrate the lack of candidness of people on reality TV under conscious surveillance, “of which claim to present reality in an unmediated way”. This I believe mirrors trend culture today exactly. Fisher puts it aptly:
“The slogan that the Big Brother TV show uses – ‘You decide’ – captures the mode of control perfectly by feedback that…has replaced old centralised forms of power. We ourselves occupy the empty seat of power, phoning and clicking in our responses. TV’s Big Brother had superseded Orwell’s Big Brother.”
At the time that the show was first aired at the turn of the century, this was less of a topic of known concern amongst viewers; nowadays it is apparent that people are progressively “haunted by questions about fiction and illusion”, making for audiences that are simultaneously in a “rapt intentness” and “disinterest”.
In his book, Fisher denounces this type of media as part of the border capitalist system that fragments attention and produces a state of continuous partial attention.
Particularly with the rise of blatant exposition and narrative formatting exhibited in Netflix shows, the shift in the quality of media entertainment has declined in order to cater to new partial-attention viewing habits alongside bingeable content.
Admittedly, I used to find myself derisive of this sort of media; however, Fisher redirected my observations to “attention deficit hyperactivity disorder”, something I initially took for granted, but have come to realise that the “consequence of being wired into the entertainment-control circuits of hypermediated consumer culture” is in fact “a pathology of late capitalism”.
This, I fear, is unfailingly the response to the insincerity and overwhelming nature of the digital age.
Now our attention is haywire.
“Presence bleed”, Kornbluh calls this, “spreads our engagement everywhere all the time”. And in the meantime, the idea of being “always on” is quickly becoming indistinguishable from time off.
Is this what we blame collective cognitive decline on? Is Mark Fisher right in thinking that systemic mental health struggles are political issues rather than individual failures?
PERFORMATISM FOR THE VOYEURISM
In my generation, I feel as though this is one of the most prevalent underlying issues we face in an increasingly commodifying world, and often find my peers like myself in a balancing act of performative living.
I hate to use ‘performatism’ as a word circulated so much in the media nowadays because it has been weaponised by capitalists to denounce a generational struggle of self-image, but it is emphatically the definition of a lifestyle we have all succumbed to. It is so easy to say now that anything is performative, but we must shift our opinions on what is a performance to be observed.
Omnipresent observationalism is the crux of modern-day living that oppresses us. If we continue to commodify ourselves to suit this online voyeurist landscape, how can we ever escape the cage of capitalist control that we have trapped ourselves in?
Self-oppression is Big Brother’s ultimate tool.
But instead of ending on such a bleak note, I’ll posit something else.
While Kornbluh suggests that more mediation might be the antidote to the influx of recycled content in “marvelisation” and “realness” as the dominant format of value, I think we need to look back at
LOST SKILLS WE NEVER REALISED WERE SKILLS UNTIL WE LOST THEM.
Here are a couple I have noted:
- Sitting with silence
- Single-tasking
- Presentness
- Mindfullness
- Groundedness
And for this we must highlight the corruption of multitasking culture.
Why do we feel the need to have a youtube video blurting groundless opinion fodder as the white noise soundtrack to folding laundry? To fill a void? To maximise our time of priceless mundanity in an attempt to absorb an incoherent string of socio-political micro statistics that we could never fully reiterate for informed conversation?
No! Because that mundanity is priceless and we have forgotten that. The digital age has rejected stagnancy as a legitimate form of productivity and demonised stillness as a taboo.
The demand for constant stimulation is becoming overwhelming, and nobody can keep up; let’s bfr.
Productivity is not the scale of measurement for success in life. But this is not an appeal to laziness. Procrastination is not a crash mat for failure. Don’t fall into the trap of defeat before attempting.
So this is my petition: END BOREDOM-PHOBIA.
