Screenworld - Page 5


The power of these interconnected screens has grown enough that a virtually unknown woman can step before the media on a Friday and by the following Wednesday be a superstar, nominated for the vice presidency of the United States. A man touted not so long ago as a promising candidate for president uses the obscure racial slur macaca, and it takes just one person with a cell phone to make an audiovisual recording of the event. Presto! Within hours, the whole world knows, and the viability of a presidential hopeful evaporates into cyberspace.

In 1949, George Orwell published 1984, a vision of the worst possible society, in which screens were everywhere, inescapable. History has turned out to be not nearly so gloomy but far more surreal. If in 1980, say, after directing Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Steven Spielberg had made a sci-fi adventure-comedy called Screenworld, well, he might have envisioned something very like our world, which, in 1980, would have seemed dizzying, funny, ridiculous, scary, technologically promiscuous, 24/7 exhausting, and appallingly lacking in privacy (privacy as a fact and as a value). Above all, in 1980, Screenworld would have seemed impossible, or, at the least, an uncertain, unmanageable future that lay thankfully in some alternate universe, far, far away.

Yet today, here we are, you and me, often engaging the world more through screens than face-to-face. Without planning to, and without especially wanting to, willy-nilly, we've become citizens of Screenworld.

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