Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (6 page)

And while these sorts of studies were declared unethical by the American Psychological Association in 1973, reality TV does seem to have picked up the thread—less for research purposes than as a last-ditch attempt to generate spectacle without narrative. Because they can’t write scripts, reality-show producers must front-load the probability for drama into the very premises of their shows. In this sense, programs like
Big Brother
,
Survivor
, or
Wife Swap
are as purposefully constructed as psychology experiments: they are setups with clear hypotheses, designed to maximize the probability of drama, conflict, and embarrassment. Let’s get women to fawn over a millionaire, perform sex acts with him on television, and then reveal that he’s really a construction worker. Let’s confine a dozen celebrity addicts in a recovery facility together, make them go off drugs cold turkey, and see what happens! (Yes, these are real shows.)

There is certainly a freedom associated with the collapse of narrative, but it is very easily surrendered to the basest forms of spectacle and abuse. Why bother making a television show at all when kids are more likely to watch a one-minute
Jackass
clip on YouTube of a young man being subjected to the “fart mask”? (Don’t ask.) We find nearly every corner of popular culture balancing the welcome release from traditional storylines against the pressure to produce similarly heightened states without them. The emergence of interactivity and deconstruction of the late 1990s led to more than one reaction from programmers and audiences. It resulted in both the self-conscious, existentially concerned presentism of
The Sopranos
and
Lost
, as well as the crass, spectacular present shock of
The Jerry Springer Show
,
Faces of Death
videos,
Mob Wives
,
Toddlers and Tiaras
, and even the Paris Hilton sex tapes.

Concerned mythologists and anthropologists foresaw this moment of discontinuity and called upon storytellers to create a new story for this new society—or else. Joseph Campbell believed the first images of the Earth from space utterly shattered our individual cultural narratives and required humanity to develop a universal story about Gaia, the Earth Mother. That clearly hasn’t happened. Robert Bly sees manhood as the principal victim of the end of storytelling, as men no longer have a way to learn about the role of the father or the qualities of good leadership. By retelling lost myths, Bly hopes, men can reestablish their connection to these traditions.

But stories cannot truly come to the rescue of people who no longer have the time or trust required to respond to narrativity. What if stories themselves are incompatible with a presentist culture? How then do we maintain a sense of purpose and meaning? Moreover, how do we deal with the trauma of having lost these stories in the first place?

Some of the initial responses to living in a world without narrative are as refreshing as others are depressing. What appears at first like a positive, evolutionary leap in our ability to contend with newfound complexity quickly, even invisibly, often seems to degenerate into exploitation and cynicism. It’s not an either/or; in most cases, both are true.

Young people have proved the most adaptable in this regard, maybe because they are less likely to mourn what they never knew about to begin with. It’s not just their media consumption that’s changing, but their social and physical activities as well. For example, freestyle, independent sports such as skateboarding and snowboarding have surged right along with nonnarrative media. Camcorders, indie media, and YouTube no doubt had something to do with this, as kids had an easy way to record and share their best stunts for all the world to see. A ten-second video shown on a one-inch-high screen can’t really do justice to a Major League Baseball double play (you can’t even see the ball), but it’s the perfect format for a single daring skateboard flip. The individualism of personal media seemed perfectly wed to the individualism of extreme sports. But the shift in sports activity goes deeper than this.

Traditional team sports are not only dependent on mainstream, larger screen television for their success, but also on the top-down style of old-school media and narrative consistency of an enduring and inviolable value system. Gridiron football has distinct battle lines, clear adversaries, regional loyalties, and a winner-take-all ethos. It is a military simulation that follows the same arc as any traditional teaching story—and often with a similar social or commercial purpose. A band of brothers comes together under the guidance of a fatherly coach, who leads them in a locker room prayer before inspiring them with a pep talk worthy of Henry V on Saint Crispin’s Day. These tropes and values don’t resonate in a postnarrative world. Besides, when we learn that the actual pregame talk in the locker room involves coaches offering a cash bounty to players who can injure the opposing quarterback,
¹⁰
the integrity of that story is undermined—no matter how vigorously the league later fines the offenders.

Baseball, meanwhile, found its power in hometown loyalty and American spirit. This was America’s pastime, after all. But as the generic power of cash overtakes the sport, teams end up moving from city to city, from historic stadiums to ones named after corporations, while players—free agents—follow the money. Players today rarely come from the cities where they play, making traditional hometown-hero narratives impossible to sustain.

Familiar team rivalries give way to personal careerism, as players compete for record-breaking stats that will win them lucrative product endorsements. Players don’t take steroids on behalf of the team but to accumulate home run totals worthy of admittance to the Hall of Fame. The congressional hearings on steroids in baseball revealed the players’ own disillusionment with the sport. “Let’s face it,” José Canseco explained, “when people come to the ballpark, or watch us on TV, they want to be entertained.” Jason Giambi echoed the sentiment: “We’re in the entertainment business.” Disgraced home run legend Barry Bonds sadly admitted, “The last time I played baseball was in college.”
¹¹

In a piece on Boston’s 2004 World Series victory, ESPN sportswriter Bill Simmons best voiced the sense of interruption and narrative collapse: “I always thought that, for the rest of my life, I would look at that banner and think only good thoughts. Now, there’s a mental asterisk that won’t go away. I wish I could take a pill to shake it from my brain.”
¹²
There’s a real asterisk, too, in the record books besides the winning seasons of steroid-using teams—as if to extract those years from the timeline of history. Senator John McCain sadly concluded that Major League Baseball was “becoming a fraud in the eyes of the American people.”
¹³
And, of course, every scandal and betrayal is chronicled in painstaking clarity by an always-on cadre of amateur journalists who—unlike the television networks—have nothing to lose by dismantling the illusion of traditional team sports.

As a result, both the National Football League and Major League Baseball have been experiencing declines in attendance over the past four years.
¹⁴
The only league on the rise is the NBA, where individual performance, celebrity, and slam dunks take precedence over local affiliation or team spirit. Michael Jordan’s fade-away jumpers will be remembered longer than his tenuous connection to Chicago. But even there, strident individualism feels at odds with the central premise of team sports. When NBA superstar LeBron James famously used a televised special—
The Decision
—to announce he was leaving his home state of Ohio to play for Miami, the Cleveland Cavaliers fans never forgave him.

Freestyle sports, like skateboarding, snowboarding, rock climbing, and mountain biking, are more compatible with a world in which team loyalty and military victory have given way to self-expression and the thrill of the moment. Team sports take hours to watch and require a very particular sort of commitment to play. A kid must sign up at school, submit to a coach, and stay for the season. By contrast, extreme sports are improvisational in nature, and more about texture, pleasure, and style than about victory over an adversary. They emphasize process, form, and personal achievement, and resist efforts to standardize play. When the world’s first great snowboarders were asked to participate in the initial Olympics competition for snowboarding in 1998, they refused, because they were concerned it would redefine a freestyle sport as rules-based and combatively competitive.

Extreme sports also tend to celebrate the very discontinuities—the roughness—that well-crafted narrative arcs try to smooth over. Compared with traditional parallel skiers, who pursue a streamlined descent down the slope, snowboarders actively thrash their course. They seek out the rough, icy patches that regular skiers avoid, in order to test their mettle and improvise new maneuvers. They cherish the unpredictability of the slope the same way that skateboarders thrash the discontinuities of the urban landscape. Every crack in the sidewalk, every hydrant, and every pothole is an opportunity. Boarders’ magazines of the mid-1990s contained articles relating skateboarding to chaos math, and snowboarding to Buddhism.

The highly experiential now-ness of extreme sports was equally susceptible to the downward pull of present shock. Professional basketball has a hard enough time maintaining a team ethic in the face of showboating and hotdogging antics on the court and off. Only heavy fines are enough to keep players thinking about team priorities, like actually winning games. Without any such disincentives, extreme sports stars soon disregarded the anticommercial ethos of their predecessors and began accepting lucrative sponsorships from clothing companies and appearing on television shows dedicated to chronicling their exploits.

Meanwhile, the net celebrates kids whose antics are the most sensationalist and, as a result, often reckless and self-destructive. An entire genre of YouTube video known as Epic Fail features amateur footage of wipeouts and other, well, epic failures. “FAIL Blog,” part of
The Daily What
media empire, solicits fail videos from users and features both extreme sports stunts gone awry along with more random humiliations—like the guy who tried to shoplift an electric guitar by shoving it down his pants. Extreme sports clips are competing on the same sensationalist scale and result in popular classics such as “tire off the roof nut shot” and “insane bike crash into sign.” Daring quickly overtakes what used to be skill. In “planking” photos and videos, participants seek to stay frozen in a horizontal plank position as they balance on a flagpole, over a cliff, or on top of a sleeping tiger. For “choking” videos, young people strangle one another to the point of collapse and, sometimes, death.
¹⁵

Maintaining a dedication to craft over crassness is not impossible, but pretty difficult when sports enthusiasts find themselves competing for the same eyeballs and accolades as plankers and chokers. The predicament they face casts an unlikely but informative light on the way adults, too, are coping with the demise of the stories we watch and use to participate in the world around us.

REAL-TIME FEED: THE CNN EFFECT

While the shift away from grand narrative in spectator sports may not radically impact the world, the shift away from narrative in spectator democracy just could. What began as a simple expansion of the way we were allowed to consume television news has resulted in profound changes to the ways in which both policy and politics are conducted, or, sadly in most cases, not conducted at all. A presentist mediascape may prevent the construction of false and misleading narratives by elites who mean us no good, but it also tends to leave everyone looking for direction and responding or overresponding to every bump in the road.

Until recently, of course, television news tended to reinforce traditional narrative values. Like the newsreels once shown in movie theaters, broadcast news compiled and contextualized footage from the field. By the early 1960s, the three main networks—CBS, NBC, and ABC—each had its own fifteen- to thirty-minute news program every weekday evening, anchored by a reassuring middle-aged man. These broadcasts enjoyed such authority that Walter Cronkite could end his broadcast, nonironically, by saying, “And that’s the way it is.” The daily news cycle gave everyone, from editors to politicians, the opportunity to spin and contextualize news into stories. This is what journalism schools taught: how to shape otherwise meaningless news into narratives.

Morning newspapers would have even more time to digest, format, and editorialize on the news of the preceding day, so that the public wouldn’t simply be confronted with the globe’s many catastrophes. We would be told what was being done about them or how they ended up, and those in charge were located and given a chance to reassure us. News editors also chose when to hold back a story altogether, for fear that its unresolved nature might worry us too greatly. Foreign dictators were not granted US airtime, for example, and scandals about politicians were held indefinitely or forever. Just as the
New York Times
promised us news that was “fit to print,” television news shows sought to promote the interests, welfare, and contentment of America by creating a coherent narrative through which we could understand and, hopefully, dismiss the news before going to bed. Thank you and good night.

None of this was necessarily intended to be devious. The widespread belief among both the political and the media industries was that the public was not sophisticated enough to grasp the real issues of the day. Walter Lippman, America’s first true public relations specialist, had convincingly argued in his 1922 book
Public Opinion
, “The real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance.”
¹⁶
Incapable of grasping news directly, the public was to be informed about issues only after a benevolent elite had crafted all this information and its implications into simple and palatable stories. In this view, the people are incapable of participating as informed members of a democracy, and their votes should not be left up to their discretion. Instead, public relations specialists would be hired to get people to vote in their own best interests. So, for example, after winning the presidency on a peace platform, Woodrow Wilson subsequently decided to go to war. He hired Lippman and his protégé, Edward Bernays, to manufacture public consent for American participation in World War I.