The tragic painlessness of the digital age, Part 2

In Part 1 of "The Tragic Painlessness of the Digital Age", I explained how the internet is diluting our emotional experience, providing the example of how popular websites like Facebook and YouTube are eliminating nostalgia from our emotional pallet.

Please read Part 1 of this article. After some time, when digital technology's numbing of our emotions becomes more obvious through the lens of historical analysis, our pain may be seen as too high a price to pay for our precious convenience. But right now, we are collectively incapable of acknowledging this, for convenience is a narcotic, and we have all become junkies. Sure, technology has always been making life more convenient; this has historically been one of its three main driving forces (the other two, paradoxically, are warfare and survival). But until fairly recently, technology has not been sophisticated enough for us to become so spiritually dependent upon it, and for us to be able to manufacture our worldview to such an astonishing degree. As such, the substance of our lives has become less important than the way our lives are represented, a symptom of our unwillingness to deal with the pain of being accountable for who we are. A good illustration of this is the digital camera, which allows us an unprecedented measure of control over the way we remember events and experiences while those events and experiences are taking place. At a party, a photograph of a group of friends is taken, examined, and if deemed an acceptable representation of the time, it is allowed to be preserved as a keepsake. If the photograph is rejected, another one is taken, and so it goes until everyone is satisfied. This is just one example of the constant editing and re-editing of our lives that human beings have always striven for, but that is now made so effortless by technology. This effortlessness, coupled with our inevitable obsession with the control we can exercise over how we are represented - to the outside world and to ourselves - has made human beings more self-aware than at any time in history. The implications of this self-consciousness are astonishing. On a cultural level, it has effectively converted art from the representation of beauty and the expression of human emotions and ideas, to a happy-go-lucky exercise in pointless self-mockery, glorification of kitsch, and the processing of archetypes into caricatures. Sure, there is an abundance, perhaps even an overabundance of creativity, but virtually none of it aspires to be significant. A movement, if any even exist (when is the last time you read a good manifesto), could never thrive in this day and age; we are far too consumed by the pursuit of painlessness. The painlessness and self-consciousness of our generation has also had a profound cultural effect. Essentially, it has eradicated almost all genre, which is too purposeful and stylistically faithful for our time. Not coincidentally, this has been accompanied by the ascendancy of a super genre, arriving just in time to fill the vacuum left by pain and purpose. As a strange twist, since our capacity to experience it has been substantially muted, nostalgia has ceased being an emotion and has become the dominant style of our time. Anything retro or vintage, be it in film, music, or sports, is an instant hit with the painless generation, who are enabled to enjoy consistency of style and sacredness of tradition without struggling for these things themselves. An instructive illustration of this can be found in the world of sports. There is currently a trend of releasing and marketing vintage uniforms and logos, a phenomenon that is particularly popular in the National Hockey League. Aside from the obvious merchandising boon that these replicas create, their aim is to essentially borrow legitimacy and importance from a bygone era of the sport, unwilling to wait and allow it to legitimize itself, and not confident in our own era's importance. This year, Wendel Clark's number was raised to the rafters of the Air Canada Centre, and interestingly, his likeness on the banner shows him wearing a vintage uniform, not the one he wore game in and game out throughout his career. I doubt that it would be taken any less seriously had he been shown wearing his actual sweater, but clearly that was their concern. What all this means is that the incredible convenience of the modern western world has got us hooked on instant gratification, and while this may seem exciting for the moment, our lives will inevitably become dull. Ultimately, we are an overstimulated society that is sheltered from deprivation, and as such we will soon be unsatisfiable and morbidly unhappy. But when we reach that point, will there be any turning back? Will it be possible to reclaim the relative innocence and unsophistication of pre-digital society? Most likely not, for though we may become unsatisfiable, we will still be junkies, and there will always be pushers to keep us that way.