Storytellersunplugged

Where Words Meet

Something to Twitter About

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I started Twittering a few days ago. For those of you who don’t know (or care) what Twitter is – www.twitter.com — it’s basically a way of microblogging from your mobile device. You can draw the attention of your ‘followers’ to a news item on Darfur or pose a Zen riddle or set up an impromptu meeting at the local Starbucks or hype some cool new person or service. You could also announce your arrival at Taco Bell and your intention to choose hot sauce over mild.

It was actually for this last – the Taco Bell kind of thing – that Twitter was purportedly designed. (Or maybe they designed the thing and tried to figure out what it could be used for and how it could be sold and this was the best they could come up with.) You can ‘follow’ – I’m from a generation that still equates this with ‘stalking’, but nevermind – other participants of Twitter and text them about all those little things that you would never bother to blog or email about. The fact that there’s a reason why you would not blog or email such things seems entirely beside the point.

Because it’s something you can do when you’re standing in line. Or stuck in traffic. Or waiting for the dermatologist. Or whatever.

It’s something you can do when you’re bored.

As I became acquainted with Twitter, I came across this idea so many times – you can Twitter people when you’re standing in line and you’re bored – that I started imagining Boredom as something like the First Evil in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer. An ancient menace so great and potentially overwhelming that society as a whole must come together and use everything in their employ – including and especially technology — to fight it off .

Because the gods forbid we be bored.

Or allow our kids to be bored.

People will say, “Oh, I get bored so easily,” as if they’re proud of this, as if it’s evidence of superior intelligence. As if it’s never occurred to them that maybe they could just carry around a good book.

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I remember a line from a Billy Joel song I heard countless times growing up: “…bored to death on Sunday afternoons.” What suburban kid of that time didn’t know what he was talking about? But this was when home entertainment was limited to twelve channels of television and whatever books happened to be in the house. Entertainment was like information: if we wanted it, we usually had to get off our asses and go out and find it.

Boredom drove us to do that. Boredom forced us, over time, to figure out just what it is we enjoy doing. Boredom might even force us to get good at it.

But now that flow has reversed itself. Instead of us going out to entertainment, information, stimulation — all these things come to us, beamed from a multitude of directions. You don’t have to leave the house. You don’t even have to leave your room. The Internet is redefining what it means to be alone — when entire social networks are just a click away.

And maybe it’s also redefining what it means to be bored. Surfing the Internet on a Sunday afternoon takes you from almost no choices to perhaps way too many.

You’re not competing for entertainment anymore. Entertainment is competing for you.

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I was born on the young end of the so-called Generation X, and we were pretty good at being bored.

Even as we grew up watching computers and video games and MTV infiltrate our homes, slowly becoming as commonplace as a lamp or a bed, only surprising you when it’s not there – we spent a lot of time being bored. We were the latch key kids who watched old reruns of Gilligan’s Island and Three’s Company and One Day At A Time and The Jeffersons. We got left to our own devices a lot. We graduated into a job market gridlocked by baby boomers who weren’t going anywhere. They made it hard to advance, and then, when the recession hit, it became difficult to get a job at all. We moved back home with our parents. We looked for work. We had time on our hands, little to lose, and very little trust in any future we didn’t create for ourselves.

The term Generation X was coined by Canadian writer Douglas Copeland. Copeland’s inspiration for it came from a lesser-known book by Paul Allen called Class: A Guide Through the American Status System. It’s a witty, scathing, insightful dissection of the various classes and the sensibilities that define them. Class, says Allen, isn’t just income but a state of mind (and taste). This holds true whether you’re lower-lower or lower-upper or somewhere in the middle or lower-upper or upper-upper or so wealthy that you disappear into a parallel land of private schools and personal jets and walls and gates and extensive security systems.

But then there’s the alternative. The X class. The way out. X’ers are those who’ve cut themselves free from the old social hierarchies. “The young flocking to the cities to devote themselves to ‘art’, ‘writing’, ‘creative work’ – anything, virtually, that liberates them from the presence of a boss or superviser – are aspirant X people, and if they succeed in capitalizing on their talents, they may end up as fully fledged X types…Impelled by insolence, intelligence, irony, and spirit, X people have escaped out the back doors of those theatres of class which enclose others,” states Allen.

In other words: Gen X’ers were those well-educated types who hung out in coffee shops a lot. They didn’t necessarily mean to be there, but it’s where the current of their time and place had put them.

You do what you can.

And out of that boredom, all that time to think and dream, a new cultural sensibility began to manifest itself through people like Cobain and Tarantino and Beck. As Richard Linklater put it in a Newsday interview: “Watching three movies a day and reading doesn’t sound productive, but it got me here.” Linklater seized on the word ‘slacker’ and definied it as “someone who’s being responsible to themselves…finding your own path through this maze of programming and pressures.” Linklater’s own path led to a movie called, appropriately enough, Slacker, and suddenly years of doing what appeared to be very little propelled him into a successful movie career.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, a different branch of those quirky X types were doing the kinds of stuff that they thought was cool, like putting together lists of cool web sites on this new thing called the Internet. Some of these lists just kept growing and growing until they became a little company called Yahoo.

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So what I’m wondering is this: what would have happened if all those Gen X graduates had graduated right into the well-paying jobs they tried so hard and so desperately to find? If they hadn’t had the time and space to dream up alternative worlds and ways of being, until the very word ‘alternative’ became a mainstream kind of genre? It’s all very well to talk about ‘finding your own path’ and ‘escaping out the back doors’ of the established structures of society, but that always comes at a price, especially when you’ve already got a mountain of student debt to pay off. With Gen X, though, that kind of lifestyle – call it class X, bohemian, alternative, counter-cultural, whatever – became the norm, sucking in a lot of very smart, very hard-working young people who didn’t choose ‘slackerness’ but had it thrust upon them. So out of those states of frustration and boredom and stagnancy, people dreamed up new stuff. Some of those dreams got put into motion, by dreamers who were also skilled and hardworking enough to execute it well and make it mean something to others, to have an impact on the culture, to take ideas from the fringes and arrow them into the heart of mainstream thinking.

Creative work is hard work; a successful artist is a disciplined artist. I’m not trying to imply otherwise. It’s way too easy to pose as an artist or writer without doing the near-daily grind of struggle, practice, feedback, rejection, revision necessary to actually become one. But sometimes you have to just detach from everything and sit alone with yourself for a while and let yourself be bored. The mind, after all, needs to move. And if it can’t sit back and be entertained, if it’s forced to come up with its own ways and tricks of entertaining itself…then it will, and in the process you just might discover who it is you really are and what it is you truly want. In the silence and stillness of boredom, you hear yourself think. You have no other choice.

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Back to Twitter. I like Twitter. It’s the kind of thing that, when someone first explains to you, you think Why would someone want to do this? Why would I possibly want to ‘follow’ someone through the banal boring details of their day? I have enough banal boring details in my own day.

Then I had a conversation with Jason Calacanis, one of these cutting-edge techie types who understands this stuff so well he is now very wealthy (or, as he so delicately likes to put it, “blown out”). Jason talked about how an invention like this is like paper. Give paper to ten different people, they’ll do four or six or ten different things with it: draw on it, make paper airplanes, line the kitty litter, whatever. People will play around until some use for it emerges that seems so brilliant and obvious that not only will everybody start using it that same way, people will wonder how they ever lived without it. Twitter, Jason said, will be like that, is starting to be like that already. People are assigning it new reasons of being. They’’re already bored with the original ones. And soon it will take its place alongside email and Paypal and Amazon and blogs and Google and iPods and TiVo and all those things we can’t believe we ever lived without.

It could also be that Twitter will become the equivalent, in this day of overscheduled teenagers and hectic work lives and the kind of constant motion that keeps us moving away from each other, of slacking off in a coffee shop. Talking about stupid stuff while, underneath it all, bits of ideas go roaming and find other bits of ideas and join up in weird, quirky and wonderful ways. As I scroll down my list of those I’m ‘following,’ I’m exposed to fragments of multiple real-time conversations juxtaposed against each other, often about things I’d never discuss with people I’d never meet in places I’ll never go to. If nothing else, Twitter is yet another way for memes to replicate themselves, to travel in far-reaching, sly, insidious ways.

And one day, when I’ve had enough, I’ll turn it off temporarily – I’ll turn everything off. I’ll lose myself in my own head and listen to what’s going on inside it. And, when the pain of doing nothing – the pain of accumulated boredom — begins to outweigh the pain of actually writing, I’ll start a new novel or story or screenplay.

I’ll put my mind in a space where it is forced to entertain itself, and it will use everything at its disposal, everything it has gathered from the world, to do just that.

Maybe in the end that’s what art is – our collective need to entertain ourselves, to make something out of all the noise in our head, engage in something interesting, beat back the beast of boredom. We remove ourselves to places of solitude and find new ways of reaching out to the world. We go deep into ourselves and our own experience and find nothing less than the human condition. Boredom – with ourselves, our lives, our routine ways of doing and being – creates the very need for creation. And so as society – or at least prominent segments of it – moves more and more toward constant connection and neverending stimulation, we might have to seek out boredom the way we once had to seek out entertainment.

Which would be rather ironic.

But irony itself can be very entertaining.

—Justine Musk

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