■ by KEN MYERS

EMOTION SICKNESS

to skeptics and atheists that we often forget the instructive quality of the rhythm of Cre- ation. God, who is beyond time, somehow takes time to create all things. And then a day of rest is established. Christian faith is thus not simply historical; it is also concerned with honoring the meaning of our temporality. Impatience is a deeply disordering vice, dis- playing at root a frustration with a God who uses time to accomplish His purposes, who has chosen not to do everything right away. While there is nothing new about impa- tience, I think it’s fair to say that no human culture has so institutionalized restlessness and a quest for immediacy as has our own. We expect that people will respond to our demands without delay and that circum- stances will be altered (whether a website loading or traffic abating or a meal being prepared) in the blink of an eye. More significantly, we expect to be able to adjust our own feelings quickly, to move emotionally from “zero to 60” in three seconds. The idea that any joys—whether sublime or mundane—might require disci- plines of cultivation is increasingly foreign to our accelerated culture.

W

Disposable Feelings

In his 2001 book Media Unlimited: How

the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms

Our Lives (Henry Holt & Co.), Todd Gitlin argues that our experience with omnipres- ent media creates in us what he describes as a new way of having emotions. We expect experiences to have an intense emotional impact immediately, but we want to be able to abandon these feelings just as quickly. Frenetic Java animations on a web page, fast- cutting 15-second commercials, 90-second news reports skimming the surface of hugely complicated stories—all are crafted to offer us a daisy chain of disposable epiphanies.

E WERE CREATED as beings intended to inhabit time well. We are so eager to defend the fact of Creation

For commercial reasons, no mass- mediated experience can afford to make us turn off the set or turn from the screen to reflect on what we have seen or heard. We have to want to come back for more. Sensational intensity rather than contem- plative depth is the ideal.

Gitlin situates this sensibility in a time long before TV or the Internet: in the Ro- mantic reaction to Enlightenment rational- ism, a reaction that established human feel- ing (and willing) as more fundamental and reliable than rea- son. Romanticism “urges us to heed the inner voice of feeling. Real life

the desire for love, acceptance, pleasure, security, power, happiness, even the desire for desire itself, or the desire for experiences that stoke desire.

The restlessness sustained by mass media is a product as much of its form as its content, and the most powerful formal device the media use to generate this rest- lessness is the sense of speed. “Speed on top of speed,” writes Todd Gitlin.

takes place in deep feeling, authentic feeling, feeling that must be pro- tected from social

impositions, feeling that was born free and longs to go native. The idea spreads that the individual is, above all, his or her feelings.” But the demands of work, sustaining relationships, and participating in social life require some tempering or management of emotions. So, as Gitlin puts it, “Romanticism must be domesticated, made to fit into the niches of life. . . . Emotions must refresh, not drain or disrupt. They must be dispos- able and, if not free, at least low-cost.” The goal is a “society of nonstop popular culture that induces limited-liability feelings on demand—feelings that do not bind and sen- sations that feel like, or pass for, feelings.”

Generating Restlessness

Gitlin’s thoughtful analysis exposes the way in which modern media don’t so much deliver information as they shape and intensify desires—and not just desires for things (the final goal of advertising) but

There is the swirling dynamic within a shot, and then the edit between one shot and the next. Montage is as relentless as the camera is restless. But in many instances, the camera movement and the quick-cut editing conceals the fact that the images themselves are not that visually interest- ing. . . . Pictorially, they often lack interest. In other words, the pleasure of beholding these freestanding images speeding by is not strictly visual but amounts to a differ- ent sort of pleasure, the kind Mark Crispin Miller calls “subvisual”—visceral pleasure at the disorientation that results from a sequence of bursts, pleasure at immersion in a wild procession of fragments. I think that “lust of the eyes” is an apt description of this condition. Gitlin’s politics and theology are far from my own, but I know of few books as insightful in analyzing the causes and effects of media saturation. If his diagno- sis is correct, churches that re-tool their worship services to accommodate these sensational expectations are simply adding momentum to a severe cultural and per- sonal disorder, which is an odd way to love your neighbors or make disciples.

This article first appeared in the November/ December 2009 issue of Touchstone: A Jour-

nal of Mere Christianity.

Ken Myers is founder, host, and producer of the Mars Hill

Audio Journal in Charlottesville,

Virginia.

EVANGEL • JUNE 2010 25 Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33