Screenworld - Page 3


Some came from as far as Europe and Asia. All had paid a bunch of money and expended great effort to get to the Petrified Forest, yet they could, in no way that I understood, be said to have been there. When they returned home, would they spend more time watching the Petrified Forest on their screens than they'd spent actually at the Petrified Forest? Was I crazy to think that their compulsion (not too strong a word if you'd seen them) to squeeze the Petrified Forest into their little screens was a means not to engage this wondrous and disturbing place? To me, they were locking these mysterious vistas into a controlled and unthreatening space. What was their connection to what I'd define as "reality"? They were treating the real, physical thing as if it were a TV show, and they were flipping channels.

All through that journey—at Monument Valley, Canyon de Chelly, the Grand Canyon—I saw the same behavior. Not everyone engaged the landscape that way, but most did—families, couples, busloads of tourists. This behavior was their version of "normal." Of course, cameras of all sorts have their place on a vacation, but only to take photos and videos.

Again, is it a psychological symptom? If so, of what, especially when considered as a mode of behavior on a fairly massive scale?

From Tactile to Virtual

All this began to happen just as Google was getting off the ground, four or five years before YouTube, and before cell phones could take pictures. Since then, what seemed to me aberrant behavior has become the world we live in.

I'm not a therapist: I'm a writer; but psychotherapy has always been key to how I make sense of the world, and I tend to look at behavior as symptomatic, in whatever sphere—intimate, political, commercial. Novelists and therapists share the fundamental assumption that behavior means more than itself, stems from deeper roots than what can be seen on the surface, and has wider implications than its supposed conscious purpose and assumptions. So it meant something when technologies that I view as disengaging became common in my own work. Something, but what?

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