Generally, I think its totally unproductive (and all too common in academia) to start talking about high falutin' nebulous concepts like "constant present" without grounding it in actual experience. In fact, this whole idea of constant present-ness came to me when I was reading through my students' last media use journals of the spring semester, in which they reflected on their media use habits and considered ways in which they could change them. So it arose from an observation of others' experiences as well as a consideration of what the absence of some medium/media would be like.
It occurred to me that most media content is "current" or "present" content. It may not always be "news" in the traditional sense. It may concern what is going on in the lives of our friends or something they are thinking about at that moment.
Take a moment to think about every media experience you had today so far. How much of it would fit into these categories (which, I believe, all refer to or are part of the present)?
- News
- Events in people's lives that happened within the past week
- People's reactions to news events (an extension of news)
- Reactions to what others are saying about their lives (an extended conversation)
- TV shows as they air for the first time (like Game of Thrones) and the conversations around them
It appears that a lot of our media use is part of a collective experience of the present or a collective conversation about the present.
What about non-current media experiences: movies that came out years ago, novels or research articles or essays from years ago. Do these make up a smaller portion of our media diets and if so, are we any the poorer for it? What's different about these experiences with media experiences that are not directly connected to the present?
These experiences seem somehow more solitary, and perhaps more intimate, to me. As a reader/viewer/listener, you feel a sense of one-on-one connection with the filmmaker, writer, or characters, even if you can't wait to go online and blog or tweet about it later.
You're also a bit more outside the sway of current social forces. Of course, all of our thoughts and feelings are influenced by current trends in thought and the collective mood of the culture, but when you're experiencing some media message from the past, your thoughts are less of a reflection of everyone else's thoughts at that time. Online, we all talk about the same things at the same time, even if we have different viewpoints about those things; it's agenda setting on a much grander scale, applying not just to news but to all aspects of our lives via social media. Stepping outside the stream of the present that we experience via most of our media diet means striking out on our own to find our own topics of interest.
Maybe having a greater portion of our lives comprised of experiences and conversations of current events has no ill effects in and of itself. Maybe all it does is create a thirst for the past, which we associate with permanence, in contrast with the ethereal, unpredictable, novel stream of the present. Maybe this thirst for the past and permanence drives us toward religion with its ancient roots.
The experience of dipping into the past by seeing a great movie that has no connection to the present, if we do this too often, can be escapism, an attempt to hide in another world because things aren't going well in the real, present world, a way of giving up, disconnecting in the worst sense. But dipping into the past, getting out of sync on purpose, has its place.
This is all the more unexpected because we have greater and greater access to media experiences from the past. It is easier than it has ever been before to dip into the past, our own personal past, or entertainment experiences from the past. And yet we do not do this all that often, I suspect, preferring the virtual company of a conversation about the present. The ability to sample the past and to combine ideas from various eras and places, I think, is just as much a creative act as trying to think of something new.
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