Saturday 10 March 2007

Pic of the day: There are of course other approaches, some of them more direct, which I won't go into today. This picture, however, is from the quite entertaining anime Mamotte Shugogetten.

Entertainment & happiness

In the previous article, we looked at the relatively short history of the modern rational consciousness, at least as applied to common people. The logical, calm, reflected, professional state of mind is necessary in many lines of work and expected in various social scenarios. But it is still not natural for many people. They deal with this in various ways. One is to leave the mask at the door and be themselves in the family, in an unreflected, impulsive and utterly undignified family behavior. But for some, this is not enough. They cannot escape that easily.

The next step (and this is probably enough for most of us) is entertainment. I use this in a broad sense. In order to feel happy, what most people miss is to stop being aware of themselves at all times, stop observing and judging themselves. Entertainment aims to fill this need. It offers us an escape from the immediate reality and into some sort of waking dream.

***

For the most literate of us (and this includes all of you, or you would not have been here in the first place) a book may be enough. The book may contain elements of everyday life similar to your own, but this is typically soon overshadowed by what I call "larger than life" elements. This need not be magic or space flight, but could just as often be the magic flight of the heart called romance. While humans are not instinctively monogamous to the same degree as e.g. swans, pair bonding is still an immensely important event, and normally very rare in your life. If you are still single, your life 40 years from now is decided to an enormous degree by this single event. It is no surprise then that we not only wager a lot of our own feelings on this, but also maintain a very alert interest in the romance of relatives, neighbors and even the rest of the village. And, it turns out, the characters in a romance novel.

While romance may be the single most popular topic of novels, it is certainly not the only one. But whether realistic or fantastic, they all share this property of being somewhat larger than life. Or at least larger than the mundane, everyday life we seek to escape from. Depending on our level of boredom this may require saving the multiverse from the Dark One or just solving a dispute over pony ownership. But in every case, the dream is so compelling that we prefer our stay there over the awkwardness of observing ourselves in real life.

Should the power of the written word fail us, either because of reading problems or the tenacity of our self-awareness, there are stronger tools to pry our attention away. Not without reason has television become the opium of the masses, following the cinema which was quite effective but not always at our beck and call. With the bright lights and loud sounds, the TV grabs your attention and does not let go. Even though the OFF button is right under your finger, it could just as well be at the other end of a long road, uphill all the way. The medium as it is used today exploits a feature of the brain called the "orientation reaction" in which our attention is grabbed by things that move and especially a change of focus. The brain is constantly caught off guard and has to establish its perspective again, and when it is done, there is a new change. Like a dog chasing its tail, the mind chases the shifting images, all the while also being told a story of sorts. Usually the story (whether fact or fiction) is one that appeals mostly to our emotions rather than to our reason. This makes perfect sense since it is the "reasonable" or at least reasoning part of us we seek to escape.

I have occasionally over the years expressed my hate and distrust for TV. I don't like to be programmed; I don't like strangers to mess with my brain. I have seen what TV does to people I liked, and I'm glad to not have it in my house. It is also a time thief of unimaginable magnitude, which is one reason why people keep wondering "where did the time go?" It leaves a gap of several unlived hours in your day, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. If an enemy did this to you, you would probably shoot him in self defense and walk out of court free, such a crime is it. But the thing is that we do it to ourselves. The unbearable burden of our self-awareness, of having to observe ourselves, of having to make conscious choices… anything is better than that, even spending your evening in a trance. And I mean the "trance" part literally. TV is biologically an altered state of mind, the brain functioning differently. It is a bit like dozing between sleep and wakefulness: You are awake enough to be interrupted without feeling disoriented, but then you are drawn right back in.

***

Television may be the pinnacle of passive entertainment, so let us move on to active entertainment. I know there are other forms of passive entertainment (music, for instance) but time would have been me too short if I should explore them all. I just want examples that are familiar to my readers, not to catalog all the world's entertainment.

The Internet, which you are probably using right now, is the natural next step. In a manner of speaking, channel surfing on the TV is a beginning, although I would still put it squarely in the "passive" box. You don't really exercise your free will much with the remote control, even if you have 50 or 500 channels. There is mostly the same stuff on them. In contrast, the Internet requires a lot more conscious choice. It is still possible to use it as pure entertainment without any kind of dialog. Not necessary, but possible and therefore common. Most people seek to be entertained, after all. To rest from the burden of their daylight self. The main portal sites on the Net cater to these people. By clicking on link after link they jump from one interesting story to another. If they come to a dead end, they just go back until they find some other interesting link, and do it again.

It is no surprise by now that the links most traveled are "infomotional": While formally informational, their appeal is that they invoke strong emotions. Sex, violence, children, animals, any combination of these are sure to draw a crowd. In contrast, boring factual articles like this one get extremely little attention. Not even one in a million surfers would go down such a path. It is not what they come for. They come for something to make them forget thinking, just not quite as deep a forgetfulness as you get in front of the TV.

While surfing is easy to get into and out of, it cannot compete with games. Computer games have grown to become extremely detailed and lifelike, only "larger than life" in any way except actual physical dimension. The sights and sounds of some modern games are breathtaking. And they cater to anything from Barbie Nail Salon to Jedi Knights. You can make your own soap operas with The Sims 2, or be a troll or a superhero in online games such as World of Warcraft or City of Heroes, or try your own take on a clash of civilizations in Civilization 4.

A disturbingly high number of games are violent; indeed they consist almost entirely of personal violence. A normal teenager will have killed thousands of realistically rendered humanoid opponents over the course of a year. Normally these take the shape of soldiers, gangsters or not-quite-human monsters such as trolls or zombies, though. There are very few games that require you to run over little old ladies or shoot small children. After all, you are still yourself while playing these games, just not completely. You are role-playing a person in different circumstances, but you still bring your own soul with you. And most people don't really enjoy being evil except when they have good reason for it, in which case they enjoy it immensely. Measures by a university hospital in Copenhagen show that the brain of gamers is literally on a high: When playing violent computer game, the young test subjects had a dopamine level significantly higher than crack addicts getting their fix. It is no wonder a common phrase among gamers is "better than sex!"

In these games, we may no longer be talking about entertainment as such. In the most advanced games, the number of choices made per minute exceeds those of normal waking life. It is just that the consequences of these choices are limited to the game world. If you die, it may be game over (though usually you are resurrected shortly). In real life, consequences are far more dramatic. The gamer knows this, and it is a big part of the enjoyment. It is a main reason for "being there", as we gamers tend to say about our virtual worlds. It is, in a manner of speaking, a second life.

Unsurprisingly there is actually an online game of sorts called Second Life. It is not particularly violent, though. It is more like a 3- dimensional chat room, where you can see rather than just read the people you chat with. A great many different interactions are possible in this virtual world (as in many others), and unsurprisingly erotic encounters (or attempts thereof, at least) feature heavily in the player- made areas. By now we have gone almost full circle: The second life is full of self-conscious, self-observing, choice-filled activity. But the self is not the ordinary, waking self. It is a virtual or imaginary self.

The purpose of entertainment is to escape the daytime self, the elaborate ego of our workday and our social façade. There is hardly any more efficient way to escape it than to live a completely different life, to project a completely different ego. It takes a lot more energy - at least mental energy - than passive entertainment, but it is also so much more rewarding.

Say, doesn't entertainment make a lot more sense now that we are aware of its purpose and what it really does? But of course once we immerse ourselves in it, we will forget that for the duration. And that is how it was meant to be. But this is not the only path.