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elfsYou probably find listening to someone else chattering on their cell phone to be incredibly annoying. Most people do, and it’s a fairly well-documented phenomenon. We are a social species, and we want to know what’s going on around us, but in this case, we can’t. When we listen to both sides of a conversation, we can create a mental map of what’s going to happen next, but with only one side, that mapping is denied us and the social animal within spends excess amounts of mental energy trying to create the other side of the conversation in a coherent way.
I think this extends to two other features of life, one old and one new. The old one is dreams: when someone is describing their dreams to you, they’re describing their half of a conversation with their sleeping self, that “other mind” that takes over in the night to sweep the day’s take of short-term memories into useful mid- and longer-term learnings, and to otherwise reset our thinking for the day ahead. The listener has no idea what’s going in that sleeping self— after all, only the dreamer has spent their entire life with it—. We try to make sense of it, when we try at all, by creating analogies to our own dream selves, which are as unique and idiosyncratic as we are, but as wholly unknown to the dream-teller as theirs is to us. If we’re compassionate, we listen patiently, but other than a improvised attempt at pop-psychology dream interpretation we don’t have, we literally can’t have, the tools necessary to discuss the dream coherently.
The new one is modern television. In an era when we can watch whatever the hell we want to watch, whenever the hell we want to watch, we’re often in a place of listening to someone tells us a story they watched or heard, without appreciating or understanding anything at all about the whole story. Big-story television like Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones requires some dedication to watch all the way through.
If my partner or office mates are discussing something they watched recently that I haven’t, I’m often baffled; the threads of the plot that the writers cared so much about can’t be conveyed in a casual conversation and so I’m left with lots of holes in the tapestry.
Beside, when it comes to conversation, I want their recent favorite story from their own lives, not whatever they got out of the television. Media is a great source of intellectual growth and even moral instruction, and if you got something out of it, fantastic. It’s also a source of deep poison, as anyone wrestling with family members addicted to FOX News can tell you, and the usual caveats about knowing what you’re putting into your brain are important.
But for the most part, our fractured, shattered media space is a source of deep frustration for many of us. We don’t share common stories, and with the media net of previous generations tattered, torn, and riven by factionalism and click-chasing, we often don’t share much in the way of reality.
Let’s get back to that.
I think this extends to two other features of life, one old and one new. The old one is dreams: when someone is describing their dreams to you, they’re describing their half of a conversation with their sleeping self, that “other mind” that takes over in the night to sweep the day’s take of short-term memories into useful mid- and longer-term learnings, and to otherwise reset our thinking for the day ahead. The listener has no idea what’s going in that sleeping self— after all, only the dreamer has spent their entire life with it—. We try to make sense of it, when we try at all, by creating analogies to our own dream selves, which are as unique and idiosyncratic as we are, but as wholly unknown to the dream-teller as theirs is to us. If we’re compassionate, we listen patiently, but other than a improvised attempt at pop-psychology dream interpretation we don’t have, we literally can’t have, the tools necessary to discuss the dream coherently.
The new one is modern television. In an era when we can watch whatever the hell we want to watch, whenever the hell we want to watch, we’re often in a place of listening to someone tells us a story they watched or heard, without appreciating or understanding anything at all about the whole story. Big-story television like Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones requires some dedication to watch all the way through.
If my partner or office mates are discussing something they watched recently that I haven’t, I’m often baffled; the threads of the plot that the writers cared so much about can’t be conveyed in a casual conversation and so I’m left with lots of holes in the tapestry.
Beside, when it comes to conversation, I want their recent favorite story from their own lives, not whatever they got out of the television. Media is a great source of intellectual growth and even moral instruction, and if you got something out of it, fantastic. It’s also a source of deep poison, as anyone wrestling with family members addicted to FOX News can tell you, and the usual caveats about knowing what you’re putting into your brain are important.
But for the most part, our fractured, shattered media space is a source of deep frustration for many of us. We don’t share common stories, and with the media net of previous generations tattered, torn, and riven by factionalism and click-chasing, we often don’t share much in the way of reality.
Let’s get back to that.
