Living in Perpetual Crisis
I don't do it. Hardly anybody does.
But TV does. For that matter, most fiction does. It can't be otherwise. For a story to be told and resolved in such a short amount of time requires one immediate, pressing crisis to come after another.
Everything presses in on everybody, demanding attention, requiring immediate action. Characters make choices, often stupid ones, in the name of building up tension and moving the plot along. In television, there are very few story arcs that last longer than an episode or two. If left unresolved for very long, those loose plots end up frustrating impatient viewers and they start tuning out.
Life just isn't like that. Most of our story arcs are years or decades in the making, not minutes. Many outlast our lifetimes. And the small arcs that are resolved in less than thirty minutes are rarely ever story worthy.
Sadly, though, our need to be perpetually entertained via television, movies, and the instant gratification of the internet not only means that we've developed amazingly short attention spans (did you know TV camera angles change an average of once every 3 seconds?), but that we expect life to be an encounter with one crisis after another. If life doesn't live up to story, it's somehow boring and plodding. And so, like millions of TV watchers everywhere, we begin to tune out. But this time, we're switching channels on our very life and amusing ourselves in strange perversions of reality -- arguably amusing ourselves to death.
Worse still, we condition ourselves to only pay attention to our immediate contexts. Life changing decisions are made on the fly, absent historical context, absent a metanarrative that is larger than our own life.
While many people object to television based on its content, I rarely make that argument. The arguments against TV that hold more weight in my mind are all related to these issues of our psychological and cultural development. Even the most harmless content isn't so "harmless" when we realize we're hard-wiring an inability to thoughtfully and prayerfully engage the real world into our brains.
But TV does. For that matter, most fiction does. It can't be otherwise. For a story to be told and resolved in such a short amount of time requires one immediate, pressing crisis to come after another.
Everything presses in on everybody, demanding attention, requiring immediate action. Characters make choices, often stupid ones, in the name of building up tension and moving the plot along. In television, there are very few story arcs that last longer than an episode or two. If left unresolved for very long, those loose plots end up frustrating impatient viewers and they start tuning out.
Life just isn't like that. Most of our story arcs are years or decades in the making, not minutes. Many outlast our lifetimes. And the small arcs that are resolved in less than thirty minutes are rarely ever story worthy.
Sadly, though, our need to be perpetually entertained via television, movies, and the instant gratification of the internet not only means that we've developed amazingly short attention spans (did you know TV camera angles change an average of once every 3 seconds?), but that we expect life to be an encounter with one crisis after another. If life doesn't live up to story, it's somehow boring and plodding. And so, like millions of TV watchers everywhere, we begin to tune out. But this time, we're switching channels on our very life and amusing ourselves in strange perversions of reality -- arguably amusing ourselves to death.
Worse still, we condition ourselves to only pay attention to our immediate contexts. Life changing decisions are made on the fly, absent historical context, absent a metanarrative that is larger than our own life.
While many people object to television based on its content, I rarely make that argument. The arguments against TV that hold more weight in my mind are all related to these issues of our psychological and cultural development. Even the most harmless content isn't so "harmless" when we realize we're hard-wiring an inability to thoughtfully and prayerfully engage the real world into our brains.