Q: “You act like you’re the smartest person in the room; why does everything have to be a lengthy lecture with you?”
A: “Oh yeah, no, I know I’m acting!”
Performativity, that cherished theme of Mannville, Alberta’s sociological superhero Erving Goffman, is ground zero for how we present ourselves. Yet, even if we know that we know that we are acting, it doesn’t mean we get off of the cultural carousel Scot-free. “To the degree that the individual maintains a show before others that he himself does not believe, he can come to experience a special kind of alienation from self and a special kind of wariness of others.” said Goffman
Just as we make ourselves in the image of our ideal type, we also create a familiar world through tried and repeated methods of evaluation. Facts matter, though, and more often than those of us with a truth-seeking mentality would prefer, the facts of this or that issue are contested terrain.
Take screen time, that bugaboo of concerned parents and erstwhile scholars alike for the last three quarters of a century. While children of the 1950s resorted to listening to their transistor radios under a blanket in their bedrooms after lights-out, kids today are more likely to be holed up with the ominous blue glow of their tablet when they should, by all rights, have long since departed consciousness to the land of nod. In between, crucially, are a series of decades where the prevalent media pariah was that tube-based lubricant of mental incontinence, the television screen. Pejoratively dubbed the boob tube, the TV was said to herald dire consequences for our minds, producing zombies far more frightening than fictional movies that subtly herald our core belief that we are agency driven subjects of our own destiny while they are mindless minions of a programmed age.
As it happens, there’s more than meets the eye when we gander into the neuro-behavioral literature about television viewership. “Genetics, they concluded, shapes brain and behavior, which in turn has wide-ranging consequences, including how many hours of TV individual children tend to watch and how their brains respond to it.” Our genetic inclinations, like the steep incline we face when seeking to make it from slothful couch nest to sleeping bed rest, goes a long way to explaining our life outcomes (and incomes) – regardless of hoe much time we log in front to the so-called “idiot box.”
“[Our findings] suggest that the changes in neurological functioning observed by Takeuchi et al. would have occurred regardless of the actual amount of television watched,” Schwartz says. A trip to the zoo, if the pop culture circus of media infotainment weren’t enough, can be instructive. Witness nappy-furred monkeys preening each other as they screen for lice, ticks, and nervous twitches. All this happens unconsciously, or pre-consciously if you will. While the primates in question are lost in space visually their eyes locked on a distant unseen horizon as they wander in and out of full awareness. Like cannabis users after a long day in society, zoo monkeys seem to nicely summarize Schrodinger’s cat: at once they are there, and not there.
This vision of a marginally catatonic state, the eyes astray part anyway, about summarizes the state of a human’s countenance when you watch them watch television. But that doesn’t mean, as we’ve seen, that there’s anything endemically wrong with some time well wasted at the television. In the end we shall all, come what may, more or less become what we are. There’s a certain pleasure in losing oneself for awhile, after all. Jacques Derrida, while describing Freud’s conception of the psychological pleasure principle whereby all minds seek pleasure while running up against the hard cold Reality Principle, notes that the final fulfillment of pleasure is itself an end, and abnegation, of pleasure itself. “Pleasure would be a tendency in the service of this function to return to the inanimate…over what time does the pleasure principle reign” (29). Time well wasted, some would say, but time nevertheless enjoyed above the median level.
As biologist Micael Pollan noted in his epic mini-series, all human cultures use plants for assorted mind altering reasons – the one exception being the Inuit who traditionally lack for botanic opportunity Yet they too, or their womenfolk at least, engage in the oldest example of brain-affect action: throat singing, which induces a degree of oxygen-to-brain alteration likewise attainable by juveniles who hyperventilate and spin in circles before falling down in laughter and/or nausea (don’t try it at home!) So next time you reach for that remote maybe just don’t; it’s okay to enjoy the pleasure of television. Plus, you just might learn something useful for your next academic essay. Or at least that’s what you can tell yourself!
References
Derrida, J. (1976/2023). LifeDeath. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/398856-and-to-the-degree-that-the-individual-maintains-a-show
Fields, D. (2016). ‘Does TV Rot Your Brain?’ Scientific American. Retrieved from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-tv-rot-your-brain/
Goffman, E. (1956). Quote from The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
Pollan, M. (2021). This is Your Mind On Plants. Penguin/Random House. Retrieved from
Q: “You act like you’re the smartest person in the room; why does everything have to be a lengthy lecture with you?”
A: “Oh yeah, no, I know I’m acting!”
Performativity, that cherished theme of Mannville, Alberta’s sociological superhero Erving Goffman, is ground zero for how we present ourselves. Yet, even if we know that we know that we are acting, it doesn’t mean we get off of the cultural carousel Scot-free. “To the degree that the individual maintains a show before others that he himself does not believe, he can come to experience a special kind of alienation from self and a special kind of wariness of others.” said Goffman
Just as we make ourselves in the image of our ideal type, we also create a familiar world through tried and repeated methods of evaluation. Facts matter, though, and more often than those of us with a truth-seeking mentality would prefer, the facts of this or that issue are contested terrain.
Take screen time, that bugaboo of concerned parents and erstwhile scholars alike for the last three quarters of a century. While children of the 1950s resorted to listening to their transistor radios under a blanket in their bedrooms after lights-out, kids today are more likely to be holed up with the ominous blue glow of their tablet when they should, by all rights, have long since departed consciousness to the land of nod. In between, crucially, are a series of decades where the prevalent media pariah was that tube-based lubricant of mental incontinence, the television screen. Pejoratively dubbed the boob tube, the TV was said to herald dire consequences for our minds, producing zombies far more frightening than fictional movies that subtly herald our core belief that we are agency driven subjects of our own destiny while they are mindless minions of a programmed age.
As it happens, there’s more than meets the eye when we gander into the neuro-behavioral literature about television viewership. “Genetics, they concluded, shapes brain and behavior, which in turn has wide-ranging consequences, including how many hours of TV individual children tend to watch and how their brains respond to it.” Our genetic inclinations, like the steep incline we face when seeking to make it from slothful couch nest to sleeping bed rest, goes a long way to explaining our life outcomes (and incomes) – regardless of hoe much time we log in front to the so-called “idiot box.”
“[Our findings] suggest that the changes in neurological functioning observed by Takeuchi et al. would have occurred regardless of the actual amount of television watched,” Schwartz says. A trip to the zoo, if the pop culture circus of media infotainment weren’t enough, can be instructive. Witness nappy-furred monkeys preening each other as they screen for lice, ticks, and nervous twitches. All this happens unconsciously, or pre-consciously if you will. While the primates in question are lost in space visually their eyes locked on a distant unseen horizon as they wander in and out of full awareness. Like cannabis users after a long day in society, zoo monkeys seem to nicely summarize Schrodinger’s cat: at once they are there, and not there.
This vision of a marginally catatonic state, the eyes astray part anyway, about summarizes the state of a human’s countenance when you watch them watch television. But that doesn’t mean, as we’ve seen, that there’s anything endemically wrong with some time well wasted at the television. In the end we shall all, come what may, more or less become what we are. There’s a certain pleasure in losing oneself for awhile, after all. Jacques Derrida, while describing Freud’s conception of the psychological pleasure principle whereby all minds seek pleasure while running up against the hard cold Reality Principle, notes that the final fulfillment of pleasure is itself an end, and abnegation, of pleasure itself. “Pleasure would be a tendency in the service of this function to return to the inanimate…over what time does the pleasure principle reign” (29). Time well wasted, some would say, but time nevertheless enjoyed above the median level.
As biologist Micael Pollan noted in his epic mini-series, all human cultures use plants for assorted mind altering reasons – the one exception being the Inuit who traditionally lack for botanic opportunity Yet they too, or their womenfolk at least, engage in the oldest example of brain-affect action: throat singing, which induces a degree of oxygen-to-brain alteration likewise attainable by juveniles who hyperventilate and spin in circles before falling down in laughter and/or nausea (don’t try it at home!) So next time you reach for that remote maybe just don’t; it’s okay to enjoy the pleasure of television. Plus, you just might learn something useful for your next academic essay. Or at least that’s what you can tell yourself!
