THE AGE OF EGOCASTING
-----------------------------------From: The New Atlantis - A Journal of Technology and Society
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The remote control shifted power to the individual, and the technologies that have embraced this principle in its wake—the Walkman, the Video Cassette Recorder, Digital Video Recorders such as TiVo, and portable music devices like the iPod—have created a world where the individual’s control over the content, style, and timing of what he consumes is nearly absolute. Retailers and purveyors of entertainment increasingly know our buying history and the vagaries of our unique tastes. As consumers, we expect our television, our music, our movies, and our books “on demand.” We have created and embraced technologies that enable us to make a fetish of our preferences.
The long-term effect of this thoroughly individualized, highly technologized culture on literacy, engaged political debate, the appreciation of art, thoughtful criticism, and taste-formation is difficult to discern. But it is worth exploring how the most powerful of these technologies have already succeeded in changing our habits and our pursuits. By giving us the illusion of perfect control, these technologies risk making us incapable of ever being surprised. They encourage not the cultivation of taste, but the numbing repetition of fetish. And they contribute to what might be called “egocasting,” the thoroughly personalized and extremely narrow pursuit of one’s personal taste. In thrall to our own little technologically constructed worlds, we are, ironically, finding it increasingly difficult to appreciate genuine individuality.
---- Christie Rosen, "The Age of EgoCasting"
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I came across this inspiring bit of exposition written by the beautiful Christine Rosen called the "Age of Ego Casting" . The article describes our obsession with the conveniences of technology. In the section "Control Freak," Rosen borrows the haunting story of "The Machine Stops" by E.M. Forster to help us envision an eerie landscape of slavish devotion to the machines we manipulate.
I really loved the section she chose to quote and I have to share it here ::::
The Machine itself controls everything. Vashti’s comfortable little cell, like millions of others, has everything she could ever possibly need: “There were buttons and switches everywhere—buttons to call for food, for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button.... There was the cold bath button. There was the button that produced literature, and there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends.” All communication is conducted through the machine; people rarely leave their rooms. At one point Vashti harks back to those “funny old days” when machines had been used “for bringing people to things, instead of for bringing things to people.” The ease of Machine-fostered life has brought a corresponding flattening of desire and bred a terror of direct experience. When Vashti is forced to travel, she is seized by anxiety: “One other passenger was in the lift, the first fellow creature she had seen face to face for months. Few traveled in these days, for thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over.” The sensibility is captured by the society’s experts, who frequently remind citizens: “Beware of first-hand ideas!”
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A world,
where we only see what we want to see, hear what we want to hear, read what we want to read.....
Is that really Utopia?
Aahh..the beauty of poetry, D.H. Lawrence encapsulates in a few words what Rosen and I slave over in prose...
Let us be Men
For God's sake, let us be men
not monkeys minding machines
or sitting with our tails curled
while the machine amuses us, the radio or film or gramophone.
Monkeys with a bland grin on our faces.
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posted by audaciousjoy @ 11:57 PM
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