On not being 'there' there

If you have parented a teenager, you will know that there is a difference between going out and going out out. Going out means you are leaving the house to do something with friends, but that ‘something’ won’t involve much in the way of drinking and clubbing. Going out out, by contrast, will involve both of those activities, along with some others that parents would rather not know about. There are certain aspects of modern life which require a similar nomenclature.       

If you’ve been to a concert recently, you may have noticed the phenomenon of people recording the event on their tablet or phone. They will have paid money to be there, but chosen to limit their participation in the gig by mediating the experience through an electronic device, presumably so they can watch it later. But the ‘watching it later’ can only be a facsimile of the actual experience. Someone might claim about a concert that “I was there … look at what I filmed”, but I’d suggest that their decision to film it means that they weren’t there there. The memory of recording an event is not the same as a memory of watching it; by definition, the former will be of a lower resolution.       

I used to think that not being there there was something of a bug in a 21^st century life shaped by technology, but I’m now more inclined to interpret it as a feature. For many folk, it seems that any event (a night-out, a birthday meal, a picnic in the park) hasn’t really happened until it has appeared on Facebook or Instagram. But if you’re using up time and energy trying to get the perfect image to post on social media, if you’re already curating an experience you’ve yet to have, you’re not really there there at all. Being there there would not involve putting the actual experience on hold while you recorded it, turning it, effectively, into something else.

This curating culture extends to recording stuff as mundane as people ‘reacting’ to something. You can find hundreds of videos on Youtube of so-and-so reacting to Arsenal’s third goal against Tottenham; or so-and-so reacting to the 'Red Wedding' in Game of Thrones; or so-and-so reacting to the trailer for the new Avengers film.

We are social animals and we crave communal experiences, but where exactly does the pleasure reside in watching someone else react to something? What’s the thrill in observing other folk doing mundane things? The judgemental part of me fears that it’s a bit like sub-contracting your own response to a third party, but the charitable part would concede that it probably just helps some people authenticate a shared experience. Or perhaps it represents something more significant. Maybe digital curation is part of some evolutionary process whereby our species will develop the appropriate neurological software to allow us to become truly technological beings.    

The ‘observing other folk at the mundane’ phenomenon is perhaps best illustrated by Gogglebox, a TV show about people watching TV in order to talk about it on TV. I’m not entirely sure where the appeal of this show lies (I don’t think it's with the sparkling wit of the participants). Is it, perhaps, that we are comforted by seeing other people doing the same lazy stuff as us? Does it somehow validate our decision to sit on the couch and watch rubbish on the telly because we can pretend that what we are doing, like those Gogglebox folk, is having a communal experience, observing and commentating on our cultural milieu? If it is true that watching TV is a passive experience, then how should we describe the act of watching other people watching TV? Not that long ago such an act would have been considered absurd.

Where can it go from here? Are there meta-contexts of curation, observation and reaction that we’ve yet to explore? With a little imagination, we could easily expand our curated universe.  

Perhaps someone should make a fly-on-the-wall documentary about the people who have to edit the footage for each edition of Gogglebox (that must be quite a job, wading through hours of material to find the entertaining bits). Then we, the viewers, could watch this programme and create some home-made content by recording ourselves reacting to a show about the trials and tribulations of the people who edit the footage of the people who watch TV in order to talk about it on TV.

This new programme (let’s call it 'G-Box Infinity') would feature us reacting to watching the people editing the Gogglebox footage. Once that was shown on TV, the Gogglebox people could watch 'G-Box Infinity' in order to talk about it on TV.  

Then, in the comfort of our living rooms, we could watch the Gogglebox people watching and talking about us reacting to watching the trials and tribulations of the people who edit the footage of the people who watch TV in order to talk about it on TV.  

I could go on, but there is a danger that I’ll accidentally set up a temporal feedback loop and blow a hole in the fabric of time.