Poking the Ants' Nest

I came across an image on Tumblr, an animated gif of raindrops striking the pane of an open window.  I gazed at it for some time, letting all of the stress of the day melt away, when I finally noticed the original poster’s comment: “I could stare at this all day.”  I certainly agreed.  I wouldn’t even need some ethereal new-age music: just the sound of raindrops would suffice.

And then I realized—why is this kind of entertainment so rare?  Why are entire channels and television programs not devoted to this kind of ambient sound and imagery?  Granted, yes, these things exist, hidden deep within our cable or satellite channels, at least for those people who have such things.  Perhaps some are familiar with the crackling fireplace for Christmas. I have also seen a snow-covered evergreen limb, white flakes drifting around it, with the soft sound of a steady wind in the background, also for Christmas. I have also learned of the Norwegian phenomenon known as “slow TV.” But when I considered what types of media are most often being pumped through cable, satellite and the Internet, I noticed instead conflict—heaping troughs of conflict—crude conflict at that—of people shouting at each other—insulting each other—the very opposite of the relaxing experience of soft rainfall.

This event, recognizing the amount of content devoted to crude conflict versus the amount of content devoted to repose, coincided with my reading of Slate’s article, “Teens Hate Facebook, but They’re Not Logging Off.”  I invite one to read the Pew Internet survey results, “Teens, Social Media, and Privacy” to see just how outrageously exaggerated the Slate article is.  The Pew survey suggests frustration but also a canny use of Facebook by teenagers to deal with this frustration.  However, at the time when I saw the Slate article, I was struck by how much I, too, had grown to “hate” Facebook.

In the mid-2000s, when I began using Facebook, oh, how I loved it.  To keep in touch with family and friends I had lost contact with when I moved was a godsend.  I realized through the site that I missed the mundane events of friendship—a friend noticing a silly license plate in traffic, a family member discovering an old photograph, a former colleague trying a new restaurant in a town I had left long ago.  Now, in 2013, I log onto Facebook with trepidation.  Which friend will post some outrageously argued polimeme (political propaganda disguised as a meme) about Obama needing an umbrella?  Which friend will equate Benghazi with Watergate?  Which friend will be offended that gay people are angry over a chicken sandwich? 

Let me be clear in order to avoid future arguments—this essay is not about Facebook because the obvious answer to that problem is to simply stop using it.  My point is this: the bickering present on Facebook is also present in the content being pumped through cable, satellite and the Internet.  Facebook is just one of many distribution centers for the constant bickering one could find anywhere. Must Americans always be sniping at each other?

And so, I asked myself, “Wouldn’t our lives, all of our lives, be so much better if instead of Fox News, or Big Brother, or Kitchen Nightmares, Americans watched, if only for a few minutes, an image of rainfall pattering against an open window?”  What would happen if Norway’s slow TV happened here?

The question made me pause.  First came a deep sigh—“Oh, what a wonderful world that would be.”  After that came a fear—“Isn’t that dangerously close to Brave New World’s soma pills and ‘the feelies’?”

In reading arguments that postmodern America has become (or is becoming) a dystopia, I frequently see writers cite Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or George Orwell’s Nineteen Eight-Four.  For Huxley’s Brave New World, societal conflict is removed in a variety of ways, but all those methods are concerned with pleasure and not angst.  Feeling bothered?  Go have sex, go to “the feelies,” or go take a soma pill.  Huxley’s totalitarianism is glossed by contentment.  On the other hand, Orwell’s Nineteen Eight-Four takes the opposite route by stifling societal conflict through brutality, “the boot stamping on a human face—forever.”  The Ministry of Love, through constant surveillance of the people, can spot a dissident before he dissents and eradicate him, either through “re-education” or extermination. 

But in 2013, neither vision fits the United States.  We Americans are living in neither drugged harmony nor brutal lockdown.  The image I prefer is that of an ant’s nest being constantly poked by a child.  Imagine such a nest, with ants swarming, increasingly frenetic, until at last the ants begin to bite and sting each other instead of the stick-bearer.  Instead of a world free of societal conflict, the United States feels like a world of eternal, internal, inconsequential conflict—constant, high-pitched sniping about gay Boy Scouts, government seizure of guns, presidential umbrellas, immigrant riots in other countries but not our own, teachers unions, prayer in schools, prayer in the military, marijuana convictions for children and the elderly, use of weather weapons in Oklahoma, gun safety education for children, celebrity psychiatric evaluations, the biological dangers of Wi-Fi,  drug testing for welfare and food stamps recipients, informed choice in apparel shopping, criminalization of still births and miscarriages, transferring problematic teachers and, yes, the use of apostrophes.

My, what a strange list of subjects.

I created this list of topics from a 15 hour period of posts from my Facebook feed.  This is what my friends and family were bickering about.  And to make things worse, that particular day was a quiet day.  And to make things even worse, I had already modified my Facebook account so that the only posts I saw were from my closest friends and family.  The system hid everything but simple status updates from acquaintances and coworkers.

Is there any wonder why I’m so desperate for a webpage that simply shows rainfall?

But back to my image of American dystopia—neither the drugged but docile nor the brute boot to the face to eliminate internal conflict—but the constant poking of an ant’s nest to inspire near total societal conflict—that is a hell of a way to run a dystopia. And yet the mob goes mouth-frothing rabid about the least important things while no one’s talking about the hunger strike currently raging in Guantanamo Prison.  No one’s mentioning banking reform.  No one’s mentioning the power of moneyed lobbyists to decide policy. The list of elephants in the room larger than little old white ladies sputtering the n-word is staggering.  Most of my life has been guided by the old 60s warcry—“if you aren't outraged, you aren't paying attention”—so, yes, I do think it’s high time for pitch forks and flaming torches.  I do think it’s time for the mob to be mouth-frothing rabid.  However, I’m convinced that I currently live with a pit of ulcers instead of a stomach because more people are outraged by the asinine baby-name choices made by celebrities than they are about unequal access to health care.

What is causing this misdirected conflict soup in which Americans live? Strangely enough, I have been coming across writers who argue that in 2013, Americans have more common ground than in many periods of U.S. history. How is it, then, that we are living in one of the greatest eras of polarization and partisanship? (Note: these writers tend to be conservative pundits like Martha Zoller's Indivisible: Uniting Values for a Divided America, which sadly does suggest that perhaps we Americans might not truly share common ground any more.)

An obvious answer is narrative itself.  All narrative is derived from conflict. Remember the old, sexist canard: man versus God, man versus man, man versus self?  Not only is narrative more interesting, but an argument could be made that knowledge and meaning can only be understood through narrative.

Could it be the current appeals-to-fear trend in media?  For example, when did the Weather Channel shift its programming from “what will the weather be like today” to “what weather pattern could possibly kill you and your loved ones in your sleep”?

Could it be the state of insecurity in 2013?  The formerly privileged are resentful of lost privilege.  The oppressed are still oppressed.  The economy still feels like a recession to many even though the U.S. National Bureau of EconomicResearch states that the Great Recession ended in June 2009.

Could it be the now eternal political campaign season in the U.S.?  Just as soon as one election is over, the midterm primary campaigns begin, and the carping just keeps carping.

These are questions that I can’t answer.  I’ll let others investigate those angles.  I can only seek to make my own life a little less miserable.

I suspect that the content I consume for entertainment is causing me to engage in unnecessary conflict with others to a greater degree.  Easy enough—begin ignoring the entertainment industry. (But wait—isn’t studying language use in popular culture supposed to be my job?)

Next, I suspect that what I’ve assumed has been journalistic reporting and informed analysis of actual conflict (for example, a riot or a political scandal) is now being delivered as a form of entertainment instead.  For example, instead of reporting the government abuses exposed by Edward Snowden, news outlets report his “thrilling escape from justice.” Even what I take to be objective reporting is instead an instigator of irrelevant conflict.  So—go find a news reporting service that simply reports the facts without punditry and without bias.  Good luck with that.

Finally—go join a monastery while I wait for the mob to finally rise up over an issue that I in my arrogance deem important?

I’ve struggled for weeks on how to conclude this post.  Other than recognizing this seemingly eternal civil conflict involving minutia, I have no answers on how to deal with it.  I suppose that is the epiphany I can take from this, that no easy epiphany exists other than to do what I have been doing these past few weeks—sitting on a proverbial stump and contemplating some utopian otherworld of might be.  Or perhaps I’ll go onto YouTube and watch an example of Norwegian slow TV.