We Are
Living in a Screenworld -- Reality Isn't in the Real World Anymore
by Michael Ventura, Psychotherapy Networker
Posted on May 28, 2010
Source
Not so long ago, I taught a graduate
writing seminar in which I got caught in an argument about virtual
vs. "real" experience.
Two students—among the brightest in the class—insisted
that they could go to Rome via a computer program through which they
could
view every street, turn this corner and that as they pleased, look
at every ruin and work of art, and their experience would be as real,
as
engaged, as if they'd actually been there. n "But," said
I, "a
pigeon couldn't shit on your head."
Granting that any experience can be called "real," in
that it is an experience, I argued that there are differences in
the nature
of virtual and actual reality. For one thing, on your walk through
a virtual Rome, you aren't even walking: you're
sitting. And what's
Rome
without the wonderful smells of food? Even if your virtual Rome is
accompanied by recorded sounds of Rome, that's nothing like the sounds
of racket,
traffic, music, and language, the melodious cacophony of Italian,
spoken all around you. A flat screen gives you no sense of Rome behind
you,
and to the side of you. The rain won't rain on you, and you won't
have to dodge crazy drivers.
You're having a one-dimensional experience, literally
and figuratively. And no matter what's inputted into the program,
there's no chance of
running into the girl who sat next to you in high school chemistry—or
anyone else. What R. D. Laing once called "the freshness and forgivingness
of creation" couldn't reach out to you, nor you to it.
Your computer program couldn't include
the unprogrammed, yet the unprogrammed is generally what happens during
the engagement of human
beings with each other, and with the world. James Baldwin's truth
that "any
human touch can change you" isn't available on your computer.
I said what I thought obvious: the computerized Rome couldn't give you
what a Laing or a Baldwin would most value about Rome: the city as a
medium for engaging life beyond personal, private acts and perceptions.
They didn't get it. My argument left them utterly unconvinced, and they
looked at me bemusedly, as though I was mildly to be pitied because I
didn't get it.
What separated us? Between my sense of the real and theirs gaped a chasm
that I didn't understand.
What would a psychotherapist make of it? If, in your consulting room,
one of these students told you that the Rome on his computer is more
real than the real Rome, is that a symptom? if so, of what? Would it
be a syndrome to be addressed in therapy? or just a piece of data, a
reference-point for this particular client?
At around the same time, I saw related behavior that no one would connect
to psychological difficulty, at least in any conventional sense.
I was driving the Southwest with a companion who'd
never been there. In Arizona, on the edge of the Painted Desert,
we stopped at the Petrified
Forest, a vast, barren expanse of chaparral and mesas, on which
lie the trunks of ancient trees turned to stone. On these trees,
every detail
of bark is present and vivid, yet somehow a forest has become rock.
We
parked at the first viewing point. My companion, without saying
a word, made her way down a slope and sat. I figured she'd be there
a while,
absorbing this place out of sight of the road and of me, watching
the Petrified Forest's stones, birds, critters, and clouds, and maybe
getting
bit by a bug or two—a contemplative engagement with a present
terrain.
Waiting for her, maybe an hour, I had a very different
experience. Cars and vans would pull up; couples and families and
friends would get out
and take pictures of the landscape, and of each other, with video
and still cameras. As I stood there, leaning on my car, at least
a couple
of dozen vehicles, maybe more, came and went. After a few minutes
of disbelief, I began timing them. With three exceptions,
they stayed no
longer than five minutes. Many stayed barely two or three.
They piled out of their vehicles, took their pictures, piled back
in, and left,
presumably headed for the next viewing point, presumably to do the
same.
Some came from as far as Europe and Asia. All had
paid a bunch of money and
expended great effort to get to the Petrified Forest, yet they
could, in no way that I understood, be said to have been there. When
they
returned home, would they spend more time watching the Petrified
Forest on their
screens than they'd spent actually at the Petrified Forest? Was
I crazy to think that their compulsion (not too strong a word if
you'd
seen them)
to squeeze the Petrified Forest into their little screens was a
means not to engage this wondrous and disturbing place? To me, they
were
locking these mysterious vistas into a controlled and unthreatening
space. What
was their connection to what I'd define as "reality"? They
were treating the real, physical thing as if it were a TV show, and
they were flipping channels.
All through that journey—at Monument Valley, Canyon de Chelly,
the Grand Canyon—I saw the same behavior. Not everyone engaged
the landscape that way, but most did—families, couples, busloads
of tourists. This behavior was their version of "normal." Of
course, cameras of all sorts have their place on a vacation, but
only to take photos and videos.
Again, is it a psychological symptom? If so, of what, especially when
considered as a mode of behavior on a fairly massive scale?
From Tactile to Virtual
All this began to happen just as Google
was getting off the ground, four or five years before YouTube, and before
cell
phones could take
pictures. Since then, what seemed to me aberrant behavior has become
the world we live in.
I'm not a therapist: I'm a writer; but psychotherapy
has always been key to how I make sense of the world, and I tend
to look at behavior
as symptomatic, in whatever sphere—intimate, political, commercial.
Novelists and therapists share the fundamental assumption that behavior
means more than itself, stems from deeper roots than what can be
seen on the surface, and has wider implications than its supposed
conscious
purpose and assumptions. So it meant something when technologies
that I view as disengaging became common in my own work. Something,
but what? I
used to begin work with a tactile, blank page, making keystrokes
on a typewriter whose mechanics I understood.
Now I begin with a
blank screen
on a machine whose technology I can barely comprehend. I don't
believe that's changed me as a writer, but I miss the typewriter's
clickety-clack,
the ding of the margin-bell, the movement of the carriage back
and forth, the shudder of my desk under pounded keys. (I blew my
first
computer
keyboard in a matter of weeks, before I learned to type more gently.)
The computer, which once seemed alien, is now embedded
in the dailiness of my life; but after 12 years, I'm no closer to understanding
it. I believe more than ever that a virtual Rome isn't Rome, and
is,
in fact,
nothing like Rome, and I'd rather gaze at the Petrified Forest
than photograph it—because, unless one is a photographer of the
first rank, there's no way to trap that grandeur in a box. Still,
it must mean something
that when I look about me, I see screens, screens,
screens—everywhere,
screens, including right here, in front of me, right now.
At arm's reach are three: the trio of computers accessible
from this chair (often I work on two computers at once). Another
screen glares
across the room—the television. My cell phone, also at arm's
reach, has a screen, even though I bought the simplest device possible:
it cost
10 bucks, but it can take and transmit photos and movies, and features
menus I don't bother to understand.
Now you see screens at checkout counters and laundromats, in restaurants
and waiting rooms, and on the dashboards of cars and in their back seats.
Millions of regular folks preen for screens on YouTube and Facebook,
marketing their image like politicians or starlets. What with Blackberrys,
iPhones, and a 10-buck cell, few Americans go anywhere anymore without
a screen that connects to every other screen in some way or other, linking
to any event or broadcast or data source anywhere, including satellite
photos of every address you know, and most you don't.
These screens disconnect us, too. I work where I live, so, theoretically,
I need never leave my apartment: I can order shoes, pet food, people
food, parts for my car, and lingerie for my girlfriend right here on
this screen, and anything purchasable can be delivered right to my door.
Now that I think of it, it seems like half the people I know met their
present significant others via the screen, and they aren't kids: they're
middle-aged and aging.The power of these interconnected screens has grown
enough that a virtually unknown woman can step before the media on a
Friday and by the following Wednesday be a superstar, nominated for the
vice presidency of the United States. A man touted not so long ago as
a promising candidate for president uses the obscure racial slur macaca,
and it takes just one person with a cell phone to make an audiovisual
recording of the event. Presto! Within hours, the whole world knows,
and the viability of a presidential hopeful evaporates into cyberspace.
In 1949, George Orwell published 1984, a vision of the worst possible
society, in which screens were everywhere, inescapable. History has turned
out to be not nearly so gloomy but far more surreal. If in 1980, say,
after directing Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Steven Spielberg
had made a sci-fi adventure-comedy called Screenworld, well, he might
have envisioned something very like our world, which, in 1980, would
have seemed dizzying, funny, ridiculous, scary, technologically promiscuous,
24/7 exhausting, and appallingly lacking in privacy (privacy as a fact
and as a value). Above all, in 1980, Screenworld would have seemed impossible,
or, at the least, an uncertain, unmanageable future that lay thankfully
in some alternate universe, far, far away.
Yet today, here we are, you and me, often engaging the world more through
screens than face-to-face. Without planning to, and without especially
wanting to, willy-nilly, we've become citizens of Screenworld.
A Collective Delusion of Reality
Something
enormous has happened: the scale on which our society judges a human
event has changed—which, in itself,
is a human event of the first magnitude, and is, to my knowledge,
something psychotherapy
has barely begun to gauge.
In Screenworld, images of reality supersede
reality itself, editing it, transforming it, playing with it in any fashion,
until the source
of the image ceases to matter while the image itself becomes all
that matters. It began a century ago, with motion pictures, when
one had to
seek out the screen but couldn't control it. Sixty years ago, television
brought the screen into our homes. However great their influence,
one left the TV and the movie theater to go out into the world. Now,
cyber-powered
Screenworld is ever-present, making reality seem infinitely malleable,
and all of us may add our own twists at a whim. In Screenworld, the
world has become a place in which, as a band called Living Color
put it, "everything
is possible, but nothing is real."
When a Blackberry brings the workplace with you wherever
you go, where you are becomes less itself, less important as itself:
the sense of a
place loses its specificity, its particularity, its own complete
reality. When you shop online, your community becomes less real;
you don't need
it as you once did: you don't need the bookstore; you don't need
the music store. Losing their reality, such places disappear—literally.
You walk down the street talking on your cell, and the observable world
becomes a mere backdrop—unless you see something to video on your
phone, when the world becomes your movie-set, gauged for its value as
entertainment, not engagement. With an iPhone on your belt and an iPod
in your ear, solitude is no longer solitary, while you hear not the sounds
of the world, but your programmed soundtrack. The very idea of privacy
is close to becoming alien, especially to the young, for whom to be "out
of touch" is unthinkable, while calling and texting are seemingly
constant. A place inaccessible to Screenworld is called a "dead
zone"—which kind of says it all about Screenworld.
Isn't there something peculiarly disembodied
about it? Human beings evolved to take in an enormous amount of information
through our bodies.
That's what "body language" is all about, not only gestures
and postures, but physical inflections so subtle we aren't aware of making
them in. Consider something as uncomfortably intimate as standing with
strangers in an elevator: there are strict rules of elevator etiquette—never
stare at anyone, keep your eyes front and slightly downward—precisely
to protect ourselves from how forcefully bodies speak to one another,
even unintentionally. Or consider the subtle signals that pass through
a simple handshake. That entire realm of reality is absent
from Screenworld,
where one need never deal with the bodily strangeness of strangers—for
even face-to-face on a web-cam, one responds to the image of a body,
not a body, and that image rarely conveys skin-tone, not to mention scent.
Is
this bad? Is it good? I'm not making those judgments. I'm simply
pointing out that Screenworld is another order of reality, one
that has overwhelmingly
instituted itself amid what we used to call reality, changing
the givens, the rules, the environment. As animals, we're built
to live in a physical
world; in Screenworld, we're living in something else. In our
overlay of cyberspace and physical space, bodily reality is devalued,
while the
adage that "the unexamined life is not worth living" gets distorted
into "what the screen does not record or project is not really
happening."
Without anyone's intending it, the Uber-reality of
Screenworld tends to frame as inferior or minor that which is beyond
its concern or reach,
for that's the fundamental and unstated assumption that it enforces,
and it's Screenworld's most dangerous illusion—or, more accurately,
its delusion, a delusion that should interest the entire field
of psychotherapy, a delusion that what's untranslatable through
Screenworld, or of no
interest to it, has no urgency, no vitality.
That very delusion bestows upon Screenworld its power—the
notion, especially in the young, that not to pay close attention
to all these
screens is to be less than fully engaged.
The dilemma is: how does one find or grow a sense of centeredness amid
this continually shifting screenscape?
That isn't a question Screenworld encourages or
entertains, and isn't a question I'll attempt to answer here, but
it's an issue
that psychotherapy
must investigate—because, for many, Screenworld is the
only world. Psychotherapy is uniquely positioned for such an
investigation,
because
it's one of the few endeavors that Screenworld doesn't rule.
Therapy as Counterculture
If I felt the need to consult what would be my fifth (or sixth?) therapist,
I'd be stepping into a space that's rarer and rarer: an American environment,
an American institution, free of Screenworld. In fact, psychotherapy, by its nature and purpose, is
Counter-Screenworld, Anti-Screenworld.
Consider the psychotherapist's consulting
room: quiet,
intimate, a place to which Screenworld has no access. Oh, there may
be a computer about,
but it isn't likely to be functioning during my 50-minute hour,
because the purpose of my being there is to engage with my therapist
in a face-to-face
encounter. Rather than a devalued physical reality, in the consulting
room, physicality is magnified. Client and therapist register every
sigh, every glance, every fidget—and either they're looking
at each other or they aren't, and both are intensely aware of that,
either
way.
My therapist and I meet privately to do a job of work,
the work of understanding—as
opposed to, say, conducting business, negotiating a contract, or any
of the task-oriented reasons for which one may meet formally face-to-face.
We meet in the consulting room to understand why I'm there. To do that,
we try to understand who I am—because I don't understand anymore,
or I wouldn't be there. To use the indelicate expression of my old
Bronx neighborhood, I'm fucking up, or something's fucking with me,
or both,
and if that weren't so, I wouldn't be in your consulting room, and
that's what you and I, therapist and client, face-to-face, will try
to understand.
And in that attempt, some foothold of understanding, however basic
or tentative, whether achieved intellectually, intuitively, or emotionally,
may spur wanted but unexpected personal change.
I wouldn't be there if I didn't want to change something,
to feel more alive, feel more myself, deal better with whatever
I've been unable to
deal with. The therapist's sole job is to try to understand another
human being, or at least another human being's situation—and
in my hour, that human being happens to be me. In a world that's
become Screenworld,
incessantly inviting and/or goading me to pay attention to something
other, only this Counter-Screenworld exists for the express purpose
of making me face myself while facing another, and of inviting
another to
face the real me. The 50-minute hour is as far from "surfing
the net" as it can be. Amid Screenworld's constant interruptions,
where focusing is harder and harder and multitasking subverts
that ability,
the therapist and I have met in order to focus. Ours isn't the
autohypnosis of focusing on a screen that one can control: ours
is a vibrant exchange,
which neither party wholly controls. We meet in a formal intimacy,
in that it has a form (50 minutes), which, like the poetic forms
of sonnet
and haiku, imposes its own intensity, an intensity that depends
on nothing but us, because it can emerge only from the therapist
and myself. You
can't get more Anti-Screenworld than that—not with your
clothes on, anyway.
Amid Screenworld's special effects that seem to make
reality malleable, the therapist asks, "What's your real world? the one that's yours?" In
Screenworld, where, especially for the young, life looks like a performance,
good therapy questions the construct of audience–performer, asking,
in effect, "Who's your audience? your peers? your daddy? the mirror?"—asking
you to rethink what you're playing to, questioning your own assumptions
and Screenworld's.
In Screenworld, you're looking outward;
that's the nature of its existence. In the consulting room, you're
looking inward, not safely alone, but
in the always unpredictable presence of another human being. Stripped
of psychotherapy's often obfuscating terminology, the core of the practice
is the timeless truth that nothing has more potential to shift our experience
of ourselves than a frank, face-to-face encounter.
Knowing another person is the key to therapy and the
exact opposite of Screenworld, where you can't be certain even of
the sex of those
with whom you chat.In the first decades of psychotherapy, people
considered therapists mysterious, obscure, and even comical, precisely
because
they
were doing something professionally that nobody else was doing—which
made psychotherapy, by definition, a revolutionary endeavor, a
revolution in self-awareness. It was such a revolutionary project
that it had
to invent its own language.
Now the language of psychotherapy has been assimilated
into the culture and made commonplace, impositions of commerce have
intruded upon and
in many cases limited the practice, and "the talking cure" has
become a quaint phrase for a now seemingly old-fashioned worldview. Yet
if psychotherapy still saw itself as a movement (as it once did), and
if that movement were starting now instead of a century ago, in the context
of Screenworld, it would be nothing less than revolutionary, because
of its quiet, its intimacy, its demand for face-to-face frankness, its
worldview, and its purpose—not information, but meaning; not
entertainment, but understanding; not passivity, but engagement.
It would be nothing less than revolutionary because it's everything
that Screenworld isn't; and because the consulting room, by its nature,
is one of the few places where the values of Screenworld are seriously
questioned and alternatives seriously investigated, not in any abstract
sense, but for your particular life.
Is it too much to say that if psychotherapy were
a movement starting today, pitting its face-to-face ways and values
against an omnipresent
and ultimately impersonal Screenworld, the project of psychotherapy
might be seen as heroic? To See and Be Seen.
So I enter the Anti-Screenworld of the consulting
room. I really want a cigarette, but that isn't allowed anymore—which
is a pain in the ass and knocks away my favorite crutch and most
practiced pose.
(Ah, for the olden, golden days, when my therapists smoked!)
My therapist asks a question as my cell phone rings.
"Turn that off," my therapist says gently—or
not so gently, as the case may be.
There goes my connection (or what I feel is my connection)
to the entire world, my lifeline to Screenworld. Now it's just me
and this damned
therapist—the
two of us, plus the reasons I'm there in first place.
(There's no way to test this, but I'd bet a week's
pay that the first thing most clients do when leaving the consulting
room is turn on their
cells. Calling it a "cell" indicates how our attachment
to Screenworld has made it a kind of body-part.)
Now there's nothing left to do but face this therapist,
and there's nothing this therapist can do but face me—which is to say, there's
nothing more ancient than the situation we find ourselves in. As Socrates
said to Alcibiades, "For the soul, if it's to know itself, it's
into a soul that it must look."
So we look. We talk. We endure mutual, unquantifiable
silences. We talk some more. Eventually, something comes of that—each "something" being
entirely different, shaped by my unique nature and this therapist's.
The "something" we achieve is a result beyond the powers
of Screenworld to display. There are no faces I recall more vividly
than
my therapists', because their faces were the most prominent—indeed,
dominant—features of the consulting room. Dr. L, who could
double for Sebastian Cabot (that's a reference for old-timers
like me). Dr.
T, always so slyly amused, even when I threatened suicide, who
said, "All
I'm trying to tell you is that up is down, black is white, and
tomorrow everything changes." Gray-eyed Dr. K, so disarmingly
old, who wasn't
as smart as me (so I thought), yet usually knew where I was going
before I got there. And M—not "Doctor" anymore;
we're now in the era of first names—who was plump, pillowy,
yes, sexy (in a demure, therapeutic way); to be frank, my sense
of her sexiness helped
me stay present, even when I didn't want to. And N, how everything
she said was said with a laugh, either expressed or implied,
always making
a problem manageable in that, by her lights, it was always at
least slightly comic. And the furniture of the consulting room,
how it looms, has to
be dealt with and worked around! Dr. L, behind his imposing,
dark-wood desk, and me, a teenager, not quite knowing how to
sit in that big, plush,
real-leather chair. Dr. T, behind a less formal desk; he liked
his office dark and shadowy, small and spare, large, clear-glass
ashtrays always
to hand, the room filling up with our smoke, which seemed the
smoke of us burning through my past. Dr. K, who didn't have a
desk, his chair
facing mine in a small and bright—though not uncomfortably
bright—space.
In M's consulting room, I sat on a sofa. I don't like to sit
on sofas; I like hard chairs. Her sofa was something to deal
with. N's pleasantly
dim room was cluttered with interesting objects and oddly titled
books by authors I'd never heard of.
Each tactile, visual environment expressed the therapist's
tone and approach, so that the client was surrounded by an intentional
(so I've
always supposed) expression of the therapist's psyche. The face-to-face
environments were full of things to be dealt with, not the least
of which was my therapist's eyes, never unkind (in my experience,
anyway),
always
asking that I go a little further, dig a little deeper—an
expectation rare in any world, especially Screenworld.
Psychotherapy is many techniques and theories that
combine into an evocative art, uniquely expressed in every consulting
room, not (to the bane of
the insurance people) easily defined or quantifiable. It's a face-to-face,
you-to-me effort toward nuanced understanding—far away, though
only steps away, from a soundbite Screenworld, where understanding
is subsumed by spectacle. Screenworld is about information, most
of it useless
to any particular human being. Psychotherapy is about meaning—which,
in the end, the human animal cannot live without. Psychotherapy is
two flesh-and-blood, breathing, speaking, silent, smiling, frowning,
sometimes
crying, sometimes laughing, sometimes yelling humans, present to
each other as a Screenworld facsimile can't be.
Whatever its flaws and faults, and however far it
has yet to go, psychotherapy stands for the ancient truth that the
journey of a thousand miles begins
beneath your feet, and, as Basho wrote, "The journey itself
is the home."
Michael Ventura writes the Letters at 3AM column for the Austin Chronicle.
© 2010 Psychotherapy Networker All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/147002/
