A few
weeks ago, I went to a street fair in one of the suburbs north of Chicago. The Chicago area has many wonderful street
fairs during the summer, and they are something that is eagerly awaited by its
inhabitants during the long cold snowy winters.
But as with many of the fairs, there was one aspect of the entertainment
that I found annoying. There was a rock
band that was playing the music so loud, it was hurting my ears. The musicians seemed to be quite comfortable
with it. It didn’t seem to matter that
most of them would be deaf by the time they were in their thirties. It is true that most of the audience seemed to
tolerate the music volume. Many of the
members of the audience had wisely come prepared with ear plugs. For those who
didn’t, they would be subject to the same damaging effects as the
musicians. In particular, it was the electric bass and
the electric guitar that were coming out with extremely strong penetrating
sounds.
The
electric guitar and electric bass have been two of the hallmarks of
international popular music since rock and roll. Some genres of this popular music like heavy
metal seem to particularly exploit the highly penetrating vibrations of these
instruments. And it is as if the
vibrations are auditory strings and the listeners are puppets who are almost
impelled to make jerky muscular movements in response. To me, this response has a different flavor
from the natural response of people to rhythmic sounds in music based primarily
on acoustic instruments.
In
many rock clubs there is also an explosive visual stimulation to complement the
penetrating vibratory sounds of modern pop music. The strobe lights are as sensorily disruptive
as the electric instruments. Strobe
lights can provoke seizures in people who have photosensitive epilepsy. But for most modern young people, they are
simply an added element in increasing the total intensity of the
experience. The combination of the
auditory disruption of the music and the visual disruption of the lights
creates a machine-based ecstatic disequilibrium for them.
Technology
has been used to create a purposeful disequilibrium in human entertainment for
many years now. Perhaps the most salient
examples are the roller coasters, ferris wheels and other rides found in
amusement parks. The disequilibrium of
these rides was a special treat when they first appeared. They offered something unusual for people
who, for the most part, lived very conventional routine lives. And this is the key. People who went to amusement parks did not usually
go that often. My friends and I went a
few times during the summer at most.
On
the other hand, people can listen to recordings of heavy metal music all the time. And they can go to music clubs every
week. So sensorily disruptive technology
is much more integrated into people’s entertainment today than in the early days
of the amusement park.
Other
forms of entertaining sensorily disruptive technology today are in the area of
transportation. Certain forms of high
speed transport create tremendous disequilibrium through a rapidly moving sense
of dislocation. Vehicles like race cars and
motorcycles. Apart from the dislocation
of the rapid speeding movement, there is the additional component of the
abrasive static noise. Race cars are the
domain of a more select group of people, but a lot of young people love to
speed with their conventional cars, sometimes specially re-outfitted for more
speed and more noise, and many people have motorcycles and motor scooters. For many people, motorcycles and motor
scooters are their fundamental form of transport. Within the sensory distortion these vehicles
create, people are also very vulnerable to serious accidents.
What
unites all these sensorily disruptive technological devices is that they are
attempts by humans to create controlled sensory distortion to block out the
pervasive sensory distortion in their external living environments, a pervasive
sensory distortion over which they have no control. The crowding, the bundles of highrises, the
speeding noisy vehicles on the street, the air pollution, the dust, noise, and
general disruption from construction sites.
This controlled sensory distortion is also a means to block out the
deeper experiential vacuum that underlies all human experience in modern
technological societies as a result of the loss of organic grounding. In a living environment with very little organic
grounding, people try to calibrate the amount of stimulation they receive by
going back and forth between overstimulation and understimulation. The entertaining sensorily disruptive
technological devices that have been discussed in this article are simply a
part of the overstimulation segment of the total configuration of stimuli that
many people create for themselves today.
But
although people are vulnerable to cravings for sources of overstimulation today
in their sensorily distorted living environments, these cravings are not simply
generated by their own needs. In
previous articles, it has been discussed how modern businesspeople assess where
the “pain” is in people’s lives, a “pain” that is a source of friction. Then
they try to develop and market labor-saving devices and apps to eliminate this
friction. The source of friction is
usually a source of organic friction, a natural part of human routine that
helps to keep a person, alive, connected to himself and to the external
world. In order to convince a potential
customer to buy this labor-saving device or app, a businessperson has to
convince him that the friction he is experiencing is actually an abrasive
negative tension-pocket source of stimulation that should be eliminated. And, of course, the continual elimination of
positive sources of organic stimuli pushes a person deeper and deeper into an
experiential vacuum in his mind.
This
is where entertaining sensorily disruptive technological devices come into the
picture. While some businesspeople
market the possibility of eliminating all supposedly painful friction, so that
people can live a supposedly beautiful relaxed life of leisure, other
businesspeople market sources of sensorily disruptive stimuli such as those we
have been discussing in this article, in order to pull people out of their
numbness, to help them feel fully alive, to give them “kicks”.
The
end result is a situation where consumers are titillated to purchase products
and services that allow them to try to calibrate the amount and kind of stimuli
that they absorb, within a field of experience with very little in the way of
organic flowing blendable continual stimuli from grounded sources. So consumers bounce back and forth between
the overstimulation of large bundles of defined discrete stimuli and the
understimulation of infinite continuous emptiness stimuli, between
tension-pocket and vacuum. This bouncing
back and forth occurs both in a consumer’s direct contact with the products and
services and also within the consumer’s mind through advertising suggestion.
Habituations
and addictions develop in people when certain fundamental emotional needs can’t
be met through normal channels, through available sources of emotional
stimuli. So people develop emotional
attachments to disparate phenomena (drugs, alcohol, food, gambling). They develop receptors for receiving stimuli
from these phenomena in the hope of deriving stimulation for and thus satisfaction
of the original need. Of course, the
original need is not satisfied by the stimuli from these alternate phenomena,
but the mental and physical pathways have been developed that create desires
for these alternate phenomena. So the
person continues to go after these alternate phenomena while always failing to
satisfy the original need.
In
today’s world, businesspeople market vacuum-creating labor saving devices and
apps and tension-pocket creating entertainment filled with kicks as a
substitute for the fundamental needs for organic grounding that people have in
modern technological society. People
crave these modern products and services, because solid organic grounding is
not easily available. They crave these
products and services in a way that has similarities to the cravings for the
products and services involved in traditional habituations and addictions. The world today is filled with these modern
products and services and the money paid for these modern products and
services, but the stimuli of organic grounding that can give people cohesion
and a feeling of being centered is in short supply.
(c) 2014 Laurence Mesirow
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