Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (3 page)

The craft of futurism—however well intentioned—almost always comes with an agenda. For those who were already familiar with the Internet, the first issues of
Wired
magazine seemed glaringly obvious in their underlying purpose to marry the values of the net with those of the free market. The many futurists who emerged in the late 1990s simply couldn’t help but predict futures in which the most important specialists to have around would be—you guessed it—futurists. The stories they came up with were tailor-made for corporations looking for visions of tomorrow that included the perpetuation of corporate power. Futurism became less about predicting the future than pandering to those who sought to maintain an expired past.

Meanwhile, all this focus on the future did not do much for our ability to contend with the present. As we obsessed over the future of this and the future of that, we ended up robbing the present of its ability to contribute value and meaning. Companies spent more money and energy on scenario planning than on basic competency. They hired consultants (sometimes media theorists, like me) to give them “mile-high views” on their industries. The higher up they could go, they imagined, the farther ahead they could see. One technology company I spoke with was using research and speculation on currency futures to decide where to locate offshore factories. The CFO of another was busy hedging supply costs by betting on commodities futures—with little regard to emerging technologies in his own company that would render the need for such commodities obsolete. Some companies lost millions, or even went out of business, making bets of this sort on the future while their core competencies and innovative capabilities withered.

As people, businesses, institutions, and nations, we could maintain our story of the future only by wearing increasingly restrictive blinders to block out the present. Business became strategy, career became a route to retirement, and global collaboration became brinksmanship. This all worked as long as we could focus on those charts where everything pointed up. But then the millennium actually came. And then the stock market crashed. And then down came the World Trade Towers, and the story really and truly broke.

The discontinuity generated by the 9/11 attacks should not be underestimated. While I was writing this very chapter, I met with a recent college graduate who was developing a nonprofit company and website to help create relationships between “millennials” of her generation and more aged mentors of my own. She explained that her generation was idealistic enough to want to help fix the world, but that they had been “traumatized by 9/11 and now we’re incapable of accessing the greater human projects.” Somehow, she felt, the tragedy had disconnected her generation from a sense of history and purpose, and that they “needed to connect with people from before that break in the story in order to get back on track.”

This was also the generation who used their first access to the polls to vote for Obama. She and her friends had supported his campaign and responded to his explicitly postnarrative refrain, borrowed from Alice Walker’s book title: “We are the ones we have been waiting for. We are the change we seek.” What a call to presentism this was! Young people took Obama at his word, rising to the challenge to become change rather than wait for it. Of course, it turned out to be more of a campaign slogan than an invitation to civic participation—just more rhetoric for a quite-storybook, ends-justify-the-means push to power. It would be left to the Occupy movement to attempt a genuinely presentist approach to social and political change. But Obama’s speechwriters had at least identified the shift under way, the failure of stories to create a greater sense of continuity, and the growing sense that something much more immediate and relevant needed to take their place.

BIG STORIES

Traditional stories, with traditional, linear arcs, have been around for a long time because they work. They seem to imitate the shape of real life, from birth to death. Like a breath or lovemaking, these sorts of stories have a rise and a satisfying fall; a beginning, a middle, and an end. While it seems quite natural to us today, this familiar shape didn’t become the default structure of stories until pretty late in human history, after the invention of text and scrolls, in literate cultures such as ancient Greece.

The Bible’s stories—at least the Old Testament’s—don’t work quite the same way. They were based more in the oral tradition, where the main object of the storyteller was simply to keep people involved in the moment. Information and morals were conveyed, but usually by contrasting two characters or nations with one another—one blessed, the other damned. Epic poems and, later, theater, followed the more linear progression we might better associate with a scroll or bound book. There’s a beginning and there’s an end. Wherever we are in the story, we are aware that there are pages preceding and pages to come. Our place in the scroll or book indicates how close we are to finishing, and our emotional experience is entirely bound up in time.

Aristotle was the first, but certainly not the last, to identify the main parts of this kind of story, and he analyzed them as if he were a hacker reverse-engineering the function of a computer program. The story mechanics he discovered are very important for us to understand, as they are still in use by governments, corporations, religions, and educators today as they attempt to teach us and influence our behaviors. They are all the more important for the way they have ceased to work on members of a society who have gained the ability to resist their spell. This has put the storytellers into present shock.

The traditional linear story works by creating a character we can identify with, putting that character in danger, and then allowing him or her to discover a way out. We meet Oedipus, Luke Skywalker, or Dora the Explorer. Something happens—an initiating event—that sends the character on a quest. Oedipus wants to find the truth of his origins; Luke wants to rescue Princess Leia; Dora wants to get the baby frog back into its tree. So then the character makes a series of choices that propel him or her into increasingly dangerous situations. Oedipus decides to find and kill the murderer of King Laius; Luke becomes a Jedi to fight the Empire; Dora enlists her monkey pal, Boots, to help her bring the baby frog through the scary forest to its home. At each step along the way, the character proceeds further into peril and takes the audience further up the path into tension and suspense.

Just when the audience has reached its peak of anxiety—the place where we can’t take any more without running out of the theater or throwing the book on the floor—we get our reversal. Oedipus learns that the murderer he seeks is himself; Luke learns that Darth Vader is his father; Dora learns she herself holds the answer to the ugly old troll’s riddle. And with that, finally, comes full recognition and release of tension. Oedipus blinds himself, Luke brings his dying father back to the light side of the force, and Dora gets the baby frog to its family’s tree. Most important, the audience gets catharsis and relief. The ride is over. The greater the tension we were made to tolerate, the higher up the slope we get, and the more we can enjoy the way down.

This way of organizing stories—Joseph Campbell’s “heroic journey”
⁵
—is now our way of understanding the world. This may have happened because the linear structure is essentially true to life, or we may simply have gotten so accustomed to it that it now informs the way we look at events and problems that emerge. Whatever the case, this structure also worked perfectly for conveying values of almost any kind to the captivated audience. For if we have followed the protagonist into danger, followed him up the incline plane of tension into a state of great suspense and anxiety, we will be willing to accept whatever solution he is offered to get out. Arnold Schwarzenegger finds a new weapon capable of killing the bad aliens, the interrogator on
Law & Order
uses psychology to leverage the serial killer’s ego against himself, or the kids on
Glee
learn that their friendships matter more than winning a singing contest. The higher into tension we have gone, the more dependent we are on the storyteller for a way out. That’s why he can plug in whatever value, idea, or moral he chooses.

Or product. The technique reaches its height, of course, in any typical television commercial. In just thirty seconds (or twenty-eight seconds, when you account for the fades to and from video blackness), a character finds himself in a situation, makes choices that put him in danger, and then finds a solution in the form of a purchase. For just one actual example: A girl is anticipating her high school prom when she notices a pimple on her cheek (initiating event). She tries hot compresses, popping it, and home remedies, which only make it worse (rising tension). Just when it looks as though there’s no way to avoid being terribly embarrassed and humiliated at her prom, a friend sees the pimple and, instead of teasing her, tells her about the new fast-acting pimple cream (reversal). She puts on the cream (recognition) and goes to the prom, pimple free (catharsis).

If we have followed the character up the ramp of tension into danger, then we must swallow the pill, cream, gun, or moral the storyteller uses to solve the problem. For all this to work, however, the storyteller is depending on a captive audience. The word “entertainment” literally means “to hold within,” or to keep someone in a certain frame of mind. And at least until recently, entertainment did just this, and traditional media viewers could be depended on to sit through their programming and then accept their acne cream.

Even if television viewers sensed they were being drawn into an anxious state by a storytelling advertiser who simply wanted to push a product, what were the alternatives? Before the advent of interactive devices like the remote control, the television viewer would have had to get up off the couch, walk over to the television set, turn the dial, tune in the new station, and then adjust the rabbit ears. Or simply walk out of the room and possibly miss the first moments of the show when the commercial ended. Although television viewers weren’t as coerced into submission as a churchgoer forced to stay in the pew and listen to the story as the minister related it, they were still pretty much stuck swallowing whatever pill the programmer inserted into the turning point of the narrative.

Then came interactivity. Perhaps more than any postmodern idea or media educator, the remote control changed the way we related to television, its commercials, and the story structure on which both depended. Previously, leaving the couch and walking up to the television to change the channel might cost more effort than merely enduring the awful advertisement and associated anxiety. But with a remote in hand, the viewer can click a button and move away effortlessly. Add cable television and the ability to change channels without retuning the set (not to mention hundreds of channels to watch instead of just three), and the audience’s orientation to the program has utterly changed. The child armed with the remote control is no longer watching a television program, but watching television—moving away from anxiety states and into more pleasurable ones.

Take note of yourself as you operate a remote control. You don’t click the channel button because you are bored, but because you are mad: Someone you don’t trust is attempting to make you anxious. You understand that it is an advertiser trying to make you feel bad about your hair (or lack of it), your relationship, or your current SSRI medication, and you click away in anger. Or you simply refuse to be dragged still further into a comedy or drama when the protagonist makes just too many poor decisions. Your tolerance for his complications goes down as your ability to escape becomes increasingly easy. And so today’s television viewer moves from show to show, capturing important moments on the fly. Surf away from the science fiction show’s long commercial break to catch the end of the basketball game’s second quarter, make it over to the first important murder on the cop show, and then back to the science fiction show before the aliens show up.

Deconstructed in this fashion, television loses its ability to tell stories over time. It’s as if the linear narrative structure had been so misused and abused by television’s incompetent or manipulative storytellers that it simply stopped working, particularly on younger people who were raised in the more interactive media environment and equipped with defensive technologies. And so the content of television, and the greater popular culture it leads, adapted to the new situation.

NOW-IST POP CULTURE IS BORN

Without the time or permission to tell a linear story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, television programmers had to work with what they had—the moment. To parents, educators, and concerned experts, the media that came out of this effort has looked like anything but progress. As Aristotle explained, “When the storytelling in a culture goes bad the result is decadence.”
⁶
At least on a surface level, the new storyless TV shows appeared to support Aristotle’s maxim.

Animated shows masquerading as kids’ programming, such as
Beavis and Butt-head
(1993) and
The Simpsons
(1989), were some of the first to speak directly to the channel surfer.
⁷
MTV’s animated hit
Beavis and Butt-head
consists of little more than two young teenagers sitting on a couch watching MTV rock videos. Though dangerously mindless in the view of most parents, the show artfully recapitulates the experience of kids watching MTV. As the two knuckleheads comment on the music videos, they keep audience members aware of their own relationship to MTV imagery. The show takes the form of a screen-within-a-screen, within which typical MTV videos play. But where a rock video may normally entice the viewer with provocative or sexual imagery, now the viewer is denied or even punished for being drawn in. When the sexy girl comes into frame, Butt-head blurts out, “Nice set”; Beavis giggles along; and the viewer is alienated from the imagery. The two animated kids are delivering a simple object lesson in media manipulation. When they don’t like something, one says, “This sucks, change it,” and the other hits the remote. Beavis and Butt-head might not have singlehandedly rendered the rock video obsolete, but their satire provided a layer of distance and safety between viewers and the programming they no longer trusted.