spring breakers (harmony korine, 2012)
"Seems like a dream... seems like a dream... seems like a dream..."
It's hard to talk about this without something like arrogance or one-upmanship rising to the surface, but please understand that that's not where I'm coming from. Don't read these words in that tone of voice, look instead for something different - a tone that perhaps you weren't expecting and then everything will make a lot more sense.
Because I've never owned a smartphone I think it's time that I talked to you about what you all look like from my perspective. Again, no arrogance, and I'm not telling anyone off. These are simply observations. But you've all definitely changed. And I'm not sure it's for the better.
When I'm talking to you you seem far more distracted: eyes flitting around the room, verbal responses which are loosely connected to what we're talking about (if at all), an obsession with small pieces of data that skim the surface of things, never going deeper. Now I drink a lot of coffee, this is true, but sometimes it feels that despite the fact that I'm caffeinated up all the time, everyone around me feels like they're moving faster than I am, thinking faster. And maybe that's a good thing? Maybe. But what seems to have got lost here is any sort of connection to anyone else. Any real human bond. Any interest in the details. If it helps, I can use some research in addition to these anecdotal observations, to combat the prevalence of the 21st century response to any conversation topic: cite your sources.
A 2017 study found that smartphone users touch their phone 2,617 times a day - that's almost twice a minute over a 24 hour period. Now you might say that all this means is that we're developing a lifestyle that incorporates multitasking on a daily basis, but heavy multitaskers simply have less brain capacity in the anterior cingulate cortex than people who focus. Added to that is the fact that the power of your brain begins to diminish at the age of (approximately) 24, and from then on learning becomes more difficult. More and more people rely on the fact that there's a database of knowledge out there, in the cloud, instead of saving anything in their own hard drive. And why make the effort to remember stuff at all if you don't have to? Additionally, as you age your brain becomes far less able to filter out irrelevant information - this is why your grandparents find it so difficult to talk to you in a crowded restaurant. What this means for you is that the flurry of information you open yourself up to every day all starts to have the same value - nothing is more important than anything else, but you don't have the time to go into detail on all of it, so you skim - you have a surface awareness of many, many things, but you don't know the details of any of these things. And you never go deeper, because as the years go by it becomes harder and harder for you to decide which things to look at more closely, so you look at none of them more closely - you simply slide over the glossy surface of everything. The final impact of all this? Put simply, as the years go by, as you check your phone more and more often, as you weaken the anterior cingulate cortex, and become more distracted by unnecessary information, you enter your later years falling far short of the mental capacity you'd have if you didn't own a smartphone.
We can also get poetic and consider that artists like Caspar David Friedrich (or any artist who worked in the sublime tradition) made nature much larger than us. We were dwarfed by the awe inspiring sights around us, and this made us feel small and insignificant. The kind of feeling that the architecture of a cathedral instills. But we've used technology to reverse this - we've put ourselves at the centre, atop the mountain, smiling inside the cathedral - and nature and the sublime now exists as a backdrop to us and our exploits. But this, of course, isn't actually the case. We're *still* insignificant, we're still dwarfed by it all, all we've done is re-written the narrative and put ourselves as the main characters. As a result, the sublime doesn't impact us in the same way as it once did. The world carries no awe. It's just an image, behind glass, that doesn't mean anything anymore. It's not about the journey, but about how many steps we took to get there - it's not about the landscape, but about how it looks with us in the foreground.
Kind of a bummer, right? Anyway, let's get back to the anecdotal.
I'm in a kitchen, talking to people, and I become increasingly aware of a need for speed in replies and answers. People are fighting to bark out their response first - a response that frequently takes the form of a cliche that might be connected to what we're talking about, but more often than not the connection is tenuous at best. I've noticed that people are less and less comfortable with the idea of simply 'not knowing' something - questions need to be answered, song lyrics cannot be left unfinished - they're strongly adverse to ambiguity and seek out the answer to everything, but don't use that information for anything. And because they have a surface understanding of everything they seem to be interested in nothing in particular. They also want to be first, to be the first to bark out the words 'Prince is dead' as though the currency of information carries more weight than the information itself. And when I'm talking to just one person, rather than a group, I notice that the eyes of the person I'm talking to can only rest on one location for a short amount of time - they're always flitting, from my face to over my shoulder, to the other people in the room, to the objects on the table, to the objects on the other tables, to the signs on the wall - always moving, never resting. And you might want to say 'Well hell Ben, did you ever consider that maybe you just aren't as interesting as you think and that they're bored and looking for something better?' And I'd say - Well get this:
I'm in a pub in West Brompton. For context, it's a large building made of wood. The person I'm talking to is doing that thing with their eyes again and I get to wondering 'Hey, maybe it is me, maybe I am as boring as all hell, maybe it's like that axiom that doesn't exist that goes How American it is to always want something better.' So I look around at the other people here, and it is everywhere. Every group that I look at is entirely populated with people who are doing the same thing, they're jumpy, eyes distracted, flitting from place to place. Conversations are jagged, punctuated by elements of popular culture, but the quilt that is created by sewing these pieces together simply describes the initial object that they're talking about, nothing new is manufactured. My eyes lock on one person in particular - he's about 27 years old, wearing jeans and a white t-shirt. He's talking to three women and it's been quite some time since he last blinked. His hands are sweating and as he talks he flits his eyes from face to face, and then at the faces and bodies all around him, he wipes the palms of his hands on his jeans repeatedly - talking to someone called Molly or Mandy. And it's then that I start to consider how important it is to be aware of where we are, of what's going on around us, but to try and ascertain some kind of deeper meaning from all of this. Perhaps some kind of message lies under the dizzying array of images. It's not just about a succession of different faces and bodies and colours. There's something more to it, so I undertake my own Georges Perec-lite style experience of looking around me, not simply to identify the information from a sight and to then move straight on, but rather to go into these sights, and to tie them all together so that they create something greater than the sum of their parts. An exercise in exhausting a place, or theme:
Two women are talking, laughing - one wears red and the other green - and there's a beautiful moment when the conversation between them lulls and they both check their smartphones in unison and their faces are lit up by an artificial light that's not only the same colour, but shifts to another hue at the same time, as though it were choreographed - a group listen attentively to a joke, bursting into laughter at *exactly* the same moment as the punchline is delivered - a crowd of people are working on a dance routine, going through the steps and movements over and over again, singing the same few bars from the same pop song as they try harder and harder and harder to get it right - and it's at this point that I start to realise that the lines between being and performance have broken down all around me - the array of lights is dizzying, they're everywhere, of every shape and colour - I look at the face of one person in particular, at how she's adjusting the position of her face in strict accordance with what she believes is an appropriate match for the words the speaker is saying - she's concentrating on exhibiting the right face, moving from interested to surprised to amused to concerned, and so on - are we looking at a case of 'being' here, or are we performing for each other in what we think is the correct way? And then I remember you, running towards me, in slow motion - and even though I know it's you, it also doesn't matter who it is, you're simply a placeholder for many people - your face obscured, revealing nothing but your eyes and lips - the scent of tobacco in the air - loosely rolled cigars, with thick pungent smoke that curls into art nouveau tendrils in the air - a silent scream that could be of joy or pain - and every time I see you in my dreams - I see your face - you're haunting me - I guess I need you...
It's hard to talk about this without something like arrogance or one-upmanship rising to the surface, but please understand that that's not where I'm coming from. Don't read these words in that tone of voice, look instead for something different - a tone that perhaps you weren't expecting and then everything will make a lot more sense.
Because I've never owned a smartphone I think it's time that I talked to you about what you all look like from my perspective. Again, no arrogance, and I'm not telling anyone off. These are simply observations. But you've all definitely changed. And I'm not sure it's for the better.
When I'm talking to you you seem far more distracted: eyes flitting around the room, verbal responses which are loosely connected to what we're talking about (if at all), an obsession with small pieces of data that skim the surface of things, never going deeper. Now I drink a lot of coffee, this is true, but sometimes it feels that despite the fact that I'm caffeinated up all the time, everyone around me feels like they're moving faster than I am, thinking faster. And maybe that's a good thing? Maybe. But what seems to have got lost here is any sort of connection to anyone else. Any real human bond. Any interest in the details. If it helps, I can use some research in addition to these anecdotal observations, to combat the prevalence of the 21st century response to any conversation topic: cite your sources.
A 2017 study found that smartphone users touch their phone 2,617 times a day - that's almost twice a minute over a 24 hour period. Now you might say that all this means is that we're developing a lifestyle that incorporates multitasking on a daily basis, but heavy multitaskers simply have less brain capacity in the anterior cingulate cortex than people who focus. Added to that is the fact that the power of your brain begins to diminish at the age of (approximately) 24, and from then on learning becomes more difficult. More and more people rely on the fact that there's a database of knowledge out there, in the cloud, instead of saving anything in their own hard drive. And why make the effort to remember stuff at all if you don't have to? Additionally, as you age your brain becomes far less able to filter out irrelevant information - this is why your grandparents find it so difficult to talk to you in a crowded restaurant. What this means for you is that the flurry of information you open yourself up to every day all starts to have the same value - nothing is more important than anything else, but you don't have the time to go into detail on all of it, so you skim - you have a surface awareness of many, many things, but you don't know the details of any of these things. And you never go deeper, because as the years go by it becomes harder and harder for you to decide which things to look at more closely, so you look at none of them more closely - you simply slide over the glossy surface of everything. The final impact of all this? Put simply, as the years go by, as you check your phone more and more often, as you weaken the anterior cingulate cortex, and become more distracted by unnecessary information, you enter your later years falling far short of the mental capacity you'd have if you didn't own a smartphone.
We can also get poetic and consider that artists like Caspar David Friedrich (or any artist who worked in the sublime tradition) made nature much larger than us. We were dwarfed by the awe inspiring sights around us, and this made us feel small and insignificant. The kind of feeling that the architecture of a cathedral instills. But we've used technology to reverse this - we've put ourselves at the centre, atop the mountain, smiling inside the cathedral - and nature and the sublime now exists as a backdrop to us and our exploits. But this, of course, isn't actually the case. We're *still* insignificant, we're still dwarfed by it all, all we've done is re-written the narrative and put ourselves as the main characters. As a result, the sublime doesn't impact us in the same way as it once did. The world carries no awe. It's just an image, behind glass, that doesn't mean anything anymore. It's not about the journey, but about how many steps we took to get there - it's not about the landscape, but about how it looks with us in the foreground.
Kind of a bummer, right? Anyway, let's get back to the anecdotal.
I'm in a kitchen, talking to people, and I become increasingly aware of a need for speed in replies and answers. People are fighting to bark out their response first - a response that frequently takes the form of a cliche that might be connected to what we're talking about, but more often than not the connection is tenuous at best. I've noticed that people are less and less comfortable with the idea of simply 'not knowing' something - questions need to be answered, song lyrics cannot be left unfinished - they're strongly adverse to ambiguity and seek out the answer to everything, but don't use that information for anything. And because they have a surface understanding of everything they seem to be interested in nothing in particular. They also want to be first, to be the first to bark out the words 'Prince is dead' as though the currency of information carries more weight than the information itself. And when I'm talking to just one person, rather than a group, I notice that the eyes of the person I'm talking to can only rest on one location for a short amount of time - they're always flitting, from my face to over my shoulder, to the other people in the room, to the objects on the table, to the objects on the other tables, to the signs on the wall - always moving, never resting. And you might want to say 'Well hell Ben, did you ever consider that maybe you just aren't as interesting as you think and that they're bored and looking for something better?' And I'd say - Well get this:
I'm in a pub in West Brompton. For context, it's a large building made of wood. The person I'm talking to is doing that thing with their eyes again and I get to wondering 'Hey, maybe it is me, maybe I am as boring as all hell, maybe it's like that axiom that doesn't exist that goes How American it is to always want something better.' So I look around at the other people here, and it is everywhere. Every group that I look at is entirely populated with people who are doing the same thing, they're jumpy, eyes distracted, flitting from place to place. Conversations are jagged, punctuated by elements of popular culture, but the quilt that is created by sewing these pieces together simply describes the initial object that they're talking about, nothing new is manufactured. My eyes lock on one person in particular - he's about 27 years old, wearing jeans and a white t-shirt. He's talking to three women and it's been quite some time since he last blinked. His hands are sweating and as he talks he flits his eyes from face to face, and then at the faces and bodies all around him, he wipes the palms of his hands on his jeans repeatedly - talking to someone called Molly or Mandy. And it's then that I start to consider how important it is to be aware of where we are, of what's going on around us, but to try and ascertain some kind of deeper meaning from all of this. Perhaps some kind of message lies under the dizzying array of images. It's not just about a succession of different faces and bodies and colours. There's something more to it, so I undertake my own Georges Perec-lite style experience of looking around me, not simply to identify the information from a sight and to then move straight on, but rather to go into these sights, and to tie them all together so that they create something greater than the sum of their parts. An exercise in exhausting a place, or theme:
Two women are talking, laughing - one wears red and the other green - and there's a beautiful moment when the conversation between them lulls and they both check their smartphones in unison and their faces are lit up by an artificial light that's not only the same colour, but shifts to another hue at the same time, as though it were choreographed - a group listen attentively to a joke, bursting into laughter at *exactly* the same moment as the punchline is delivered - a crowd of people are working on a dance routine, going through the steps and movements over and over again, singing the same few bars from the same pop song as they try harder and harder and harder to get it right - and it's at this point that I start to realise that the lines between being and performance have broken down all around me - the array of lights is dizzying, they're everywhere, of every shape and colour - I look at the face of one person in particular, at how she's adjusting the position of her face in strict accordance with what she believes is an appropriate match for the words the speaker is saying - she's concentrating on exhibiting the right face, moving from interested to surprised to amused to concerned, and so on - are we looking at a case of 'being' here, or are we performing for each other in what we think is the correct way? And then I remember you, running towards me, in slow motion - and even though I know it's you, it also doesn't matter who it is, you're simply a placeholder for many people - your face obscured, revealing nothing but your eyes and lips - the scent of tobacco in the air - loosely rolled cigars, with thick pungent smoke that curls into art nouveau tendrils in the air - a silent scream that could be of joy or pain - and every time I see you in my dreams - I see your face - you're haunting me - I guess I need you...