Schade.nfreu.de

I’m not entirely sure what I expected when I ordered my tickets for ArenaBowl XXIII for “STANDING ROOM ONLY.” Perhaps a corral where we would be led and allowed to roam around, like free-range chickens. “This is your pen, and this is where you must stay,” they’d say sternly, but we’d mill around and laugh and visit and generally enjoy ourselves.

I certainly didn’t expect to be renting my own little patch of airspace, all of 18 by 20 inches. The only indication of its existence was a one-row duct-taped grid, barely distinguishable from the concrete floor, with a little “1” scrawled in Sharpie.

But I was there to support the team, our Spokane Shock. My job, such as it was, revolved solely around screaming my lungs out while simultaneously sticking my fingers in my ears in an attempt to block out the steady low hum of the vuvuzelas so thoughtfully sold by the host team.

And so I stood in my box, eagerly.

The game got off to a bit of a slow start. I scanned the crowd, noticing some of the very same people who had stood out so conspicuously while waiting in line.

Most of the fans were properly outfitted in jerseys, official ArenaBowl shirts and other Shock-branded tees. Even among the less officially authorized clothing, some managed to nail the particular garish shade of Shock orange. They looked like human Cheetos, though decidedly of the “puffed” as opposed to “crunchy” variety.

Over there, a three-pack of neon redheads stood grinning in their sea-blue shirts like buzz-cut Troll dolls in policemen’s uniforms. And over there, next to the vuvuzela-clutching headache-in-waiting, a man who either tried to paint his face Avatar-blue and misplaced his hairline, or else applied his hair dye before going to sleep and passed the night in a frenzy of macking with his beloved pillow.

What I noticed about all of these fans was their location: in seats. Standing in front of their seats, to be more precise, as if taunting those of us who lacked accommodation for our posteriors. I shifted uneasily, trying to fend off a nice-looking middle-aged couple who unilaterally commandeered three squares, forcing me into a no-man’s land ungoverned by the duct tape.

And so I stood outside my box, warily.

There was still a game going on, I think — the Napa Auto Parts ArenaBowl XXIII. A thrilling sequence, that started with a “Toyota game ball in the stands” and was followed by a pair of “Dishman Dodge first downs,” culminated in a rather pedestrian “touchdown.” Fortunately, after the YMCA Kickoff Kid grabbed the tee — and on the heels of another Toyota game ball — the Shock defense managed a Papa Murphy’s takeaway, setting up the offense for some more Dishman Dodges and ultimately another … touchdown.

It was all terribly exciting. But it was getting to be around halftime, and my legs were starting to ache. I glanced around at my fellow standees, and most of them — though cheering — appeared to be preoccupied with alleviating pain: Doubled over to ease the strain, crouching, leaning against the wall …

I glared at the Sitters, who were of course standing. How dare they take their seats for granted? How we Standers longed for the gentle cupping of our buttocks by those plastic blue thrones, sinking in to those rigid, unforgiving slabs and literally taking the load off our backs. Where they could pile their hot dogs, their nachos and their taco salads on their knees, we set our popcorn on the floor and kicked over one another’s Bud Lights.

I fantasized a coup, a hostile takeover, in which we would remove from them their laps of luxury and line them up against the wall, just as they had done to us. But they were too numerous, and we too tired.

And so I stood in my box, uncomfortably.

The rest of the game passed in a blur. The paradox of the sports fan began to assert itself. Despite the outrageous lengths you may go to acquire a suit stitched from what can only be melted traffic cones and then wave around a bloated, grotesquely lifelike orange hand, you still must subordinate yourself to the team.

Though you wish to be recognized for your devotion, ultimately it’s not about you. And when your team is on the verge of winning it all, the arbitrary divisions between fans come down. Eight-year-olds and 80-year-olds beam alike, tripping in the heady haze provided by the proximity of champions. Standers and Sitters …

I have one small confession to make: I bailed at halftime. And though the fans at my next stop were more generous with their advice to the players (“Don’t talk to the press, get your head in the game!”) and loquacious in their constructive criticism of the referees (“I don’t even know what that call means, you encephalopathic zebra!”), they cheered all the same as we watched the clock tick down and the ArenaBowl trophy being trotted out. Whether at the Arena or miles away, a “championship atmosphere” formed wherever the fans congregated.

And so I sat on my barstool, contentedly.

This story was originally published in the Aug. 26 issue of The Inlander. I’m republishing it here because I <3 it (and, by extension, myself) so much.

For almost all purposes, Iraq has no government. Almost six months after national elections, the country’s politicians remain unable to compromise and cut a deal, showing the persistent lack of maturity and vision that has earned the political class the justifiable contempt of the Iraqi public.

- George Packer, A Date That Will Live In Oblivion.

It’s easy to point out the darkness of coloring of the respective kitchen implements in this statement, but the more pressing question is why no one seems to think this is a problem at all in our country.

Every once in a great while, people think the same way I do. This is at once both heartening (external validation of my sanity!) and annoying (“Hey, that’s mine!”). Which is why my first instinct upon reading this New York Times piece by Peggy Ornstein was to roll around the floor and hold my breath until my face turned blue. The same sort of idea had been lolling around in my head for weeks, ever since I immersed myself in the mind-numbingly droll world of cultural theory.

Luckily, the piece is more masturbatory than elucidating. The age-old conundrum of column-writing rears its ugly head yet again: Tell someone their mellifluous words are interesting, and pretty soon they’ll start believing their witty remarks on humdrum, everyday experiences are fascinating to the rest of us.¹ You mean YOU JUST STARTED using Twitter yet aren’t abandoning it on the basis of your contrived quasi-history of participation? Color me a satisfied reader.

To me, the interesting aspect of social-networking sites like Twitter and Facebook is not the psychological aspect of the area from which you derive joy (which was an utterly insipid fulcrum to balance a column on; it is in fact possible to enjoy the same thing for multiple reasons). These sites are merely extending and, in some ways, clarifying a profound shift that has been slowly making its way through our culture.

It’s difficult to imagine, I know, but once upon a time not everyone could gather around the magic glowy box and partake in 20 minutes of nonsense from everyone’s favorite anthropomorphic sponge. Instead, it was plays, political speeches or sporting matches (traditionally football) that formed the basis for an audience. You had performers over here, the audience over there, and a great big (societal as well as physical) chasm separating the two. They danced, you watched. There was a ceremony to things, a proper decorum respected by thespian and theatergoer alike (unless you were John Wilkes Booth, that play-ruining bastard). In a sense, the audience’s role was as scripted as the actors’; shush when the house lights dim, clap perfunctorily at the end of a movement, stifle giggles when your neighbor’s kid playing Peter Pan throws up all over the Lost Boys as they hoist him in the air for the flying sequence. This is known as a simple audience.²

But then came radio, with its retarded half-brother television following along in its wake (who in this metaphor is more Lenny from Of Mice and Men than Sloth from The Goonies³). The ability to transmit performances around the country meant that people no longer had to suffer the indignities of the cummerbund or corset when they wanted some entertainment. The experience was mediated through the magic of radio waves or satellite dishes (or, for the very poor, shadow puppets), allowing them to pick and choose what horrible drek disguised as entertainment they wanted to shove down their brain holes. The rules for conduct among audience members slackened considerably, though the distance (again, both socially and in the physical sense) between performer and watcher increased considerably. Even though distribution method allowed for one person to influence a large number of people, the consumers themselves experience it individually — sitting in their underwear in unswerving faithfulness to their hi-def TVs, munching Cheetohs. This is the mass audience.

With the advent of the internet, omnipresent advertising and the explosion of media sources, the audience model changed again. To put it quite frankly, the media became a pervasive influence in everyday life; from bus stop to when you close your eyes at night, you’re assaulted by media. The audience, therefore, became selective about which media it chose to focus its attention on, while letting the others recede into the background. In essence, we are all an audience all the time. This is called the diffused audience.

This is where the audience model ends. But to take that last point to its logical conclusion, if everyone is always an audience, then there must always be a performance going on. And while one can hardly argue against the notion that media is everywhere, the fact that the producers of media have changed alters the traditional compact. Where once the performance featured Jim Carrey getting made up and speaking out the wrong end of his body for the camera, our consumption of media has shifted to include amateurs as well: friends, family and the guy you met at a party that one time

Ornstein’s citation of sociologist Erving Goffman’s assertion that all life is a performance is correct; the problem lies in her ascribing its usage as a metaphor. Posting to Twitter and Facebook is not metaphorically putting on a performance; it is literally play-acting. In fact, the idea goes back much further than the 1950s. From Simnel, 1898:

In the same sense … in which we are poets and painters, we are also play actors; i.e. CULTURE endows every aspect of life with this characteristic. Without being in any sense false or hypocritical, the personal existence of the individual is metamorphosed into some predetermined guise which is of course di out of the resources of his own life, but is nevertheless not merely the straightforward expression of his own life. The possibility exists for us to assume such appearances, even strange ones, and nevertheless remain consisten with our own nature.

Here he makes the case that not only do we mediate our own experiences when conversing with others, but we also can do so without being inconsistent in regards to our own inner nature. The first thrust is undeniable; who has never posted a Facebook status that was, at least in some way, untrue? Even something so small as faking composure after breaking up with a significant other counts. On the same page, even though it seems impossible to believe (given the number of “I ate a sandwich!” or “On the crapper” tweets), Twitter is not actually a full accounting of everyday life. We can create personas, if not on the same level as WoW character, then at least one that — even to people who would consider themselves “friends” — might be unrecognizable.

This ultimately boils down to the point that, in order to agree with those suppositions, then everything short of telling someone EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED during your day (down to the “after the cessation of urination, I lingered over the toilet bowl for a few seconds, staring deep into the shallow blue waters, lost in thought”-level of detail) is in fact mediating your own life through performance.

Exactly.

Without rising to the level of Humpty-Dumpty-esque word games, every relationship you have with someone else (be it through Facebook, over the phone, working alongside them or some combination thereof) involves some level of performance — they cannot know precisely what it means to be you. There’s always some amount of self-censorship that goes into conversations, even innocuously. After all, you wouldn’t want to tell Brandi about the horrible wheat-threshing accident that cost you your thumbs when she just got a promotion, would you? In that case, not only is your action a performance in the sense that you’re feeding a selected amount of information to someone in order to influence their opinions/actions, you’re also setting up a narrative storyline (from the joy of celebrating one’s accomplishments to comforting a friend who has undergone tragedy, in itself an act that usually brings about warm feelings).

This, to say nothing of the passive-aggressive Facebook posts and tweets that always show up.⁴ You know the type. The “OMG I am so MAD right now. Why can’t people just learn to accept that I ate the goddamn gorgonzola?” Though clearly directed at one person or group of persons (presumably the person who’s gorgonzola was consumed), it’s posted where the message can be viewed by anyone. This not only has the desired effect of letting your feelings be known to the offending party, it also allows the creator to a) play the part of aggrieved victim, and b) suss out who may or may not be on his/her side. It’s by definition a performance: staging something (that should be private) in order to elicit a reaction from those assembled, whether virtually or in real life.

Facebook and Twitter serve only to make the performance phenomenon more pronounced. Indeed, certain settings within these web applications underscore that fact. On Twitter, for instance, you can choose not to have your thoughts made public; perhaps wary of job-related repercussions, or simply because you don’t want that asshole Robby to know you and Diane are back together. To choose this method makes a statement not only to the people who can access your feed (this is the unfiltered version that is decidedly NSFW) as well as those left on the outside: This feed is very secretive, and only the trustworthy may gain access. A bit overdramatic, yes, but nevertheless true.

Facebook doesn’t do nearly as good a job of cloaking your status as a performer. Originally, privacy options were almost nonexistent; everything you did could be viewed by everyone, almost the penultimate example of a mass audience (albeit in a slightly different social situation). Once everyone got sufficiently outraged⁵, they changed it so you could choose who could see want. They essentially handed over the reins of distribution to the individual user. Don’t want your church friends to know you go out drinking dressed as Marilyn Monroe on Fridays? No problem. Want to keep mom and dad out of the loop on everything save your dire financial straits? Easily done. Even the act of restricting who can view what you do is itself a reflection of the performance you’re putting on.

But what, then, of postmodernism? It’s a lot like irony in many respects, in that there are innumerable definitions for it and everyone who thinks they know what it means, doesn’t. Technically, postmodernism is merely the movement that followed modernism⁶; it sets itself apart from modernism in that it rejects the notion of absolute truth, focusing on the upheaval of traditional power structures.

In practice, however, postmodernism means absolutely nothing. Postmodern art (usually) means the rejection of the traditional notions of what art is; it separates itself from “modern art” because the latter uses something like splattered paint on canvas, whereas to be postmodern one could hurl a computer through a wall and frame it — the convention being defied is that art can even be restricted to a medium. See Duchamp’s fountain for the ultimate expression of such.

In literature, the postmodern ideal is one that is not restricted to form or idea. In addition to the rejection of traditional notions⁷ of what a novel’s supposed to look like, postmodernism has also come to encompass the idea of the self-aware novel: The character know they’re performing a story.

This is perhaps the best analog to postmodernism writ large, especially when ascribing it to person as performer. We are all aware — if dimly — of the concessions and decisions we make that allow us to operate as our own creations. We may not consciously realize it as a performance, but there is a very real moment when you ultimately decide what to tell and what not to tell.

A more interesting thing to ponder is where this urge comes from. It’s easy to blame Twitter or Facebook for this, but it’s a bit like blaming guns for shooting people — they may function as facilitators, but there has to be someone actually choosing to use these tools. Similarly, the urge to blame “celebrity culture” is a strong one, but must be resisted. No one is forced to DVR Entertainment Tonight or surf Perez Hilton’s site obsessively.

That said, celebrity culture should not be pushed aside entirely, either. Where once people turned inward to find tranquility and ponder their life’s existence, they now turn outwardly because it’s easier. Attaining true inner peace sounds a lot more difficult than racking up a few thousand Twitter followers, and there’s a much more quantifiable method of tracking your success with the latter.

Ultimately, the question will boil down to whether this is a “good” thing or a “bad” thing⁸. Not to sound too postmodern, but such an arbitrary distinction kind of goes beyond what we can know. It simply is. We cannot judge the innate goodness of the endeavor because there is no method of capably measuring its worth. As with most things humans create, be it abstract concept or physical thing, its value is entirely dependent on how we choose to use it.

Notes

1. This, in itself, is horribly post-modern. And likely hypocritical. This note, however, is so post-modern as to reflexively bend back in on itself, to emerge Victorian.
2. Nicholas Abercrombie and Brian Longhurst, Audiences (University of Michigan, 1998). All of the audience bits germinated from this book.
3. Though both are rather unassuming, Sloth eventually comes to redeem himself and to assist when called upon, even if the people he’s helping were his tormentors. Lenny, on the other hand, is kind-hearted and means well, but isn’t aware of his own capability for destruction. Ultimately, it’s better that Lenny not stick around.
4. The analog passive-aggressive note is a masterful stroke, most commonly found in the workplace or in roommate squabbles. It’s the perfect way to gauge the level of support for an idea if someone is unsure of its popularity. Tacking up a “NO POOPING IN THE BATHROOM. BE COURTEOUS TO OUR GUESTS” sign allows the sign-maker to not only advance an agenda, but also to ascribe it motives that — if done in-person — would be much easier to see through. If someone brought up the topic in casual conversation, it would be difficult for them to say “well, it’s for the guests” without everyone thinking “Bullshit. You just hate having the closest desk.” But in an unsigned note, there’s no way to cast aspersions of personal bias. Though it’s decidedly less effective as a method in a situation with only two people — something most roommates don’t discover until one is holding a butter knife to the throat of the other.
5. It remains eternally baffling that people don’t comprehend the concept that things put on the internet can be viewed by other people. This incredulity enjoyed particular usage during the early days of LiveJournal and MySpace; teenagers used these services like they were private journals, then professed outright outrage that others were reading, commenting and making fun of them for it. Most of the ones who didn’t get angry were those that quickly discovered the “make private” option, thus implying that they actually did expect their journals to be private. The rest were just bloviating because they had nothing better to do (this was before the widespread availability of pornography).
6. You’d think English majors could come up with something more inventive than “after the thing we just did.”
7. David Shields’ Reality Hunger — A Manifesto is almost book as performance art. Derived from the ethos of remix culture, it takes bite-sized chunks of other works to craft a cogent narrative of its own. His original manuscript did not include notations, but the publisher forced their inclusion. He compensated by putting a dotted line along the inner edges of those pages, to better facilitate their cutting and removal.
8. Of course, the only sane way to resolve such a weighty and important dispute is via cable television. Talking heads will blather on, refuting evidence not presented and presenting evidence not existing, until Jon Stewart eventually appears miraculously on a white horse and runs them through with his blade. His breastplate, naturally, will be gleaming.