“I want two scoops with gummy worms, Oreo pieces, M&Ms, chocolate sauce, and sprinkles,” the girl requested.
“But what flavor of ice cream do you want?” asked her dad.
“Does it matter?” replied his daughter.
Does it matter, indeed.
The practice of adding more and more extras until the original item, the fundamental part of the experience, is irrelevant. Does it matter, indeed!
Comics are meant to mirror real life, aren’t they? They’re a great way of bringing out the idiosyncrasies of society; an effective medium for revealing the underlying behaviors that we all practice. So in what other areas besides ice cream selection do we do this? What other experiences do we dilute with extras until the original activity loses its significance?
The first one that came to mind is relationships. In a youth culture in which individuals like to relate to one another through bits of trivia and meaningless connectivity, it becomes easier and easier to objectify people and sort them by their characteristics, their likes and dislikes, and their perceived personality. Someone’s actual character, a thing distinctly separate from personality, becomes pushed further and further into the background. When this happens, finding a potential spouse becomes as easy as making a checklist of attributes, and once you meet someone who fulfills all of them, marriage is not far behind. You don’t want a real relationship with someone who shares your values, beliefs and personal convictions; rather you desire someone who “you can laugh with, someone who appreciates music, the arts, and who is just as at comfortable with a slow night at home as going out and hitting the city night scene.” You’re looking for the extras, the add-ons, to make the experience worthwhile.
Other times, it’s the extras that make the activity even tolerable at all. Would you buy a car with no CD player or cruise control? What about power, heated, leather seats, an iPod hookup, or a video entertainment system?
Because a car doesn’t need any of those things.
But, unless you’re going really really fast, driving is an inherently boring activity. It’s monotonous, not particularly mentally or physically stimulating, and sometimes very nerve-wracking. For many people, driving without being entertained would be interminable. Hence we now have all of these options available on our cars that help us relax and be more comfortable and entertained. This is also, I think, a big part of why we like to talk on the phone and drive.
I’m sure there are more examples of this, but for now we’ll just leave it at driving. The point is that inherently boring activities lightened by extras make them bearable.
Obvious questions arise here. Firstly, we know that this happens - so is it a good thing or a bad thing? If driving is seen as a necessary evil, are things that make it more tolerable acceptable even if they detract from the experience? Most would say yes. Some would even argue that in the case of driving, the add-ons make the experience what it is - i.e. driving IS listening to music. What about in relationships? Is it too much of a stretch to say that the US divorce rate is at 50% because we rush into relationships based on how well our checklist matches the people we meet? This is slightly problematic at best and pathological at worst. And what could this trend hold for he future of society as more and more of it moves online?
The practice of adding extras to enhance boring activities is almost a given in the current state of online universes such as World of Warcraft and Second Life, where something as basic as existing is already boring. Online life, i.e. being a digital avatar in an online world, is without the element of outside forces and randomness that is a innate part of our earthly universe. Things don’t “just happen” to you when you’re in an online world. (And when they do, as in the case of "random battles," they quickly get annoying and we wish them gone.)
Consequently, any enjoyment that you derive from being in an online world is a direct result of the experiences that you initiate. What you get out of acting in an online world is a direct result of what actions you undertake and, accordingly, you almost always get an expected result. You reap exactly what you sow. This set up allows for very little experience to have value, if value is defined as getting more out of something than what you put into it. (For example, if you buy a computer from a liquidating electronics giant for half of its original price, that is a good value - you received a computer that is worth more than you paid for it.)
If you ask people what they most value about life, I think you will find that most people will talk about the little things in life. Things like watching a sunset, staring at the stars, feeling a warm breeze, walking through crunching leaves, getting a hug, or eating a juicy bunch of grapes. A lot of these things are not affected whatsoever by human actions. Some of them are, yes, but a lot of the great things about nature are things that we cannot control. Since we reap the benefits but invest nothing, these are valuable experiences. And maybe more importantly, these actions are unquantifiable.
There are very, very few of these experiences in a controlled online universe as it exists now. Random nice things seldom happen to you, and you must search long and hard to find anything of true value. As more and more interactions take to the online world, and if the digital frontier is the future of human society (and it is) then this problem of lack of intrinsic value will have to be fixed. We will have to find ways to make simply existing in the online realm a valuable experience.
So now not only do we have to scrutinize our off-line lives to see how we can put meaning back into experiences but we have to figure out how to do so in the online world as well. What seems to be a learned behavior off-line is a fundamental part of the online experience. Either we as a society find a way to fix it in both realms or we learn to live with it and thrive off of it - an option that I think is less than ideal. Either way a lot of change is in order, and the sooner we get to work on it the better.
_DZ
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