Was anyone else made uncomfortable by the cover of the October Wired? The headline "Capturing Eyeballs" - a reference to the grand ambition of the creators of RealVideo - struck a nerve with me. It's not that I find the phrase (or, for that matter, the image of giant, free-floating eyeballs) patently offensive. Rather, for me, the collage powerfully evokes a frightening truth that most of us would prefer not to think about: Our culture is increasingly saturated by a flurry of images created not so much for meaningful expression as for the temporary abduction of people's consciousness.
German film director Wim Wenders calls this social condition "the disease of images." It is the paradoxical affliction in which "you have too many images around so that finally you don't see anything any more," Wenders explains. "I'm no better. I fall under the spell of MTV whenever I get into a hotel room.... We're living in a time right now when narrative disappears more and more. And as for images? The more there are, the emptier they seem to be."
Wenders' 1991 movie Until the End of the World brilliantly conveys the danger of image saturation by taking it to its logical extreme. Setting: It is 1999, and a leading scientist has invented a camera that can record and replay not just images, but also the neurological recipe behind each image. It can enable the blind to see what the sighted see, and allow people to view images they have seen before - not on videotape, but in their own minds. When the inventor's adult son (played by William Hurt) and the son's companion (Solveig Dommartin) begin using the camera to record and view their own dreams, they become hopelessly addicted to, and strung out on, an endlessly intoxicating video montage.
It's an elegant metaphor for contemporary postindustrial society: a fragmented, alienated collection of individuals who seem to continually shift their attentions between TV and alternative flickering images - Game Boy, flashing billboards, news and stock tickers, and now, of course, the Shockwave/Java-charged Web. Meanwhile, the TV itself never seems to get turned off, but is instead left on as animated wallpaper in bars, restaurants, lounges, offices. Wherever a TV appears, it sucks attention toward itself, as though it were emitting its own irresistible visual-gravitational pull.
And that pull gets stronger and stronger as the years go by. These days, we tend to think of TV as a dowdy, time-worn technology, but in fact, television content has been radically transformed over the last 30 years; the hardware hasn't changed much, but the software has become a lot swifter, more dense, and more fragmented. Some call it the MTV-ization of television. Most commercials and many programs are now built around blindingly fast cuts, multiple perspectives, purposeful discombobulation - all of which can make television almost as thrilling as playing a videogame. Television has always had a hypnotic quality; but the recently emerging hyper-television is clearly more addictive than ever.
Wenders' drug-addiction analogy only goes so far, of course. Never, to my knowledge, have EMTs had to resuscitate someone from too many HBO specials. My car windows don't keep getting smashed in by people hard up for another fix of Reebok commercials. But go to any TV-equipped bar or hotel lobby and watch the eyes of those who are exposed to the volumeless TV sets. If "capture" isn't the perfect word for TV's hold over these subjects, I don't know what is.
Now the Web is becoming more like TV. Good news for industry stockholders, I suppose, but we consumers will have to work increasingly hard to distinguish between the moving images that are worthwhile and those that are merely trying to Capture Our Eyeballs (which is to say: Selling us something). I myself thought it a very dark day the first time I saw those rudimentary, Java-fueled, flickering images online. There is, after all, something to be said for the unspoiled, static page - be it online or offline. I'm not anti-video, by any means. What I'm against is gratuitousness - images that quiver simply for the sake of quivering. Hey you! Look at all the excitement up here! Slate is a great example of how flickering eyeball-lures can interfere with serious ideas. On virtually every page, insightful, thought-provoking prose is forced to do battle for the eye against the mightier, flashier advertisements up top.
In the denouement of Until the End of the World, a writer (played by Sam Neil) rescues the woman hooked on images by having her read his recently finished book. "I didn't know the cure for the disease of images," says the writer, who also narrates the film. "All I knew was how to write. But I believed in the magic and the healing power of words and of stories." It's a cliché, of course, to say that television and the book are mortal enemies. But the truth is that prose and moving images can be powerful antagonists. Kurt Vonnegut, one of our great contemporary champions of prose, articulated this beautifully in an Inc. Technology magazine interview two years ago:
But not all great minds think alike. There's a terrific book coming out soon that will forcefully and brilliantly argue against this notion of a disease of images. In The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word, NYU journalism professor Mitchell Stephens (a friend and former colleague) proposes that hyper-video images are hurling us into a new cultural renaissance. "The moving image has the potential to help resolve [our] crisis of the spirit," he argues, "by providing the tools - intellectual and artistic tools - needed to construct new, more resilient understandings."
"Video," Stephens says, "can follow the fitful wanderings of consciousness. It can grow surreal, even abstract, and all the while still engage. It moves easily, ineluctably to an ironic distance and might, therefore, lead us to whatever truths lie beyond ironic distance. It has the potential to open new perspectives on the world, as writing once did, as printing once did."
I don't entirely disagree with Stephens' analysis of the transcendent power of moving images. But, all in all, I think he's dead wrong about where hyper-video is taking us as a society. If we allow the flickerers to Capture Our Eyeballs, I'm afraid our eyes will float freely and permanently away from our minds.
Related links:
Janelle Brown on the MTV generation
Jon Katz on why Shenk and his ilk doth protest too much
David Shenk on how we create the market for media overkill
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
