I was washing dishes in my cousin's
small temporary abode one Sunday night, when I heard something about
the notion of time on the radio. I turned it up, despite objections,
in a home tiny for 3 people, where each room is presided over by a
big screen, as is increasingly the case in U.S. American habitats.
The fragments I heard over the whining child, the passifying mother,
the running tap, and the smooth clang of dishes, made me run to my
computer to find the radio show discussing different realities of
time: not just perceptions of it. This is a somewhat familiar and
radically attractive subject for me, as the most recent lecture by my
favorite philosopher is on the same topic (Judith Butler's “One
Time Traverses Another”).
I listened to that one hour segment
on time thrice: each time while doing something else, so loosing
essential pieces, and enjoying repetition. Then I began to listen to
other segments of the same program. I've always adored radio, which
has helped me learn more than one language. But I hate the snippets
of violence reports that often passes for news, so I've been shying
away from spontaneous and arbitrary crime descriptions lately. Today,
as I ate my dinner, jet-lagged after a flight across the Atlantic, I
listened to the radio again, this time discussing another big subject
close to me, philosophically: matter. And I noticed that I was doing
something while listening that I do not do (nor does anyone else I
know) while watching
television or films: I was thinking.
Let's say that
there could be several reasons for this. One of them might concern
the difference of the sense of hearing compared to hearing and
watching at the same time. Not only does video engage both senses
since it consists of moving pictures, the speed is an added element
that is likely to contribute to overwhelming the viewer and thus
passifying us into the well-documented torpor induced by watching it.
(Everyone is probably familiar with the evidence that shows slowing
down of all vital signs, etc.)
I think that
there is a direct connection here with a lack of thinking. Along with
the slowing down of vital signs, thought itself seems to be slowed
down, pushed out of the picture by the overabundance of stimulation
that video increasingly strives to achieve since studies show that TV
watchers and movie goers become equally more spellbound and placid
when the images change faster and more drastically (hence the
ever-increasing predominance of explosions and violence on screen,
that doesn't so much make experienced watchers squirm in their seats,
as plasters them in place, stultifying, and I would add stupefying,
into eye-wide horror or suspense).
But if video is
such a negatively impacting thought-killer (if not soul killer, which
can also be argued from a secular perspective), and we reject
overwhelming conspiracy hypothesis, why has its popularity risen to
such a seemingly all-consuming level? Or, if the answers to this
question are all too obvious, perhaps we better ask: is video really
all bad?
20th
century philosopher Walter Benjamin thought that film was the new
revolutionary art form, in the first decades of its birth. And no
doubt, varying forms of what I have called “video,” as an
umbrella term for film and television, can offer radically positive
and inspiring—I'm searching for a noun here—thought? Yes, perhaps
even that. Elisa Santucci-Nitis, a contemporary philosopher, points
out that Benjamin did not simply reject oversimplifications like good
or bad, he also wrote that it was technology that held the key to
revolution that could bring real equality to people. So the value of
technology in general, and video and radio specifically, certainly
depends (not on how they are used but) on what we do with them.
In
today's globalized society, especially in rich countries that have
been called “overdeveloped societies,” video and
commercialization have jointly taken the place of religion as social
dominators. And video seems to work as a better passifyer than any
drug, even if most things can be understood to work on the model of
addiction, precisely because it pushes thought so far off
screen...(which may be essential to the present modus operandi which
depends on environmental devastaion and structural injustice).
But what I really
wanted to talk about was: radio. And how in today's environment, some
radio programs manage to offer serious nurturance for thought, not
just junk food for escapist illusions. What if thinking were
essentially dialogical, that is, what if unlike the assertions of
most privileged philosophers, thinking is not a narcissistic activity
conducted in the privacy of one's own mind, but rather requires a
dialogue? At a time of increasing, often excruciating social
isolation, radio could then sometimes offer that interlocutor, that
other mind, in conversation with which our own thought can unfold.
(And to what extent this thought would remain “our own” will have
to remain an open question, at least for now.)
Oh, and the
program I was talking about with segments that got me listening again
is: Radiolab, which has been a delightful companion and inspiration
for this fragment of thought about what else video might be killing
besides that radio star we never even knew, and in all likelihood,
for the better. (Who needs celebrities anyway, when one can think of
real stars together?)
Maya Nitis, PhD
in Media and Communication
Berlin, January
2014
