All Eyes On Me

I don't think television has rotted my brain, as I was warned* when I was a child. The tragic irony, I guess, is that if it has rotted my brain, it's unlikely I'd have the cognitive acumen to suss it. The only way to be sure would be to compare my brain as it currently is against another theoretical version of my own brain with less/no exposure to television and compare the higher reasoning functions of the two. But the other version of my brain, the one with the differential level of television exposure, is either going to be a) some kind of abstract algorithmic construct based on projections rooted in a deep understanding of what parts of the brain exactly we expected to be rotted by television (as far as I can tell, if my memories of adolescence are trustable, and using my mother's most strident and oft-vocalized concerns as a guide, they'd be the parts that remember to put dishes in the dishwasher); b) the result of TIME TRAVEL; or c) a thing those of us overeducated in history call counterfactual: building an argument based on things that didn't happen; on outcomes that branched in a way inconsistent with actual outcomes. Great fun to spin out, and maybe even lucrative if you're Harry Turtledove or Philip K. Dick, but a fast route to a solid D-minus if used as a foundation for your senior thesis, even at say, by totally nonspecific example, at a mid-level state-funded university in California in the late 1990s. Maybe YOU don't want to know what would have happened if the Carthaginians had invented a machine gun, Professor Killjoy, but maybe someone else wants to read a Punic Wars narrative that has something more exciting than a bunch of slow-ass war galleys sometimes knocking into each other. Come on: elephants, Alps, AK-47s... Bad-ass. Throw in a couple of explosions and some women with no substantive part to play and that's a Michael Bay movie.

As a parent of long standing, now it's become my turn to worry about the things that are rotting the brains of my children. Logically I know there's no electronic visual or auditory mode of entertainment that is actually causing my children's human brains to actually putrify or atrophy, but it's one of those things that come upon you all of a sudden in middle age whether you want them to or not, like gout or the desire to date a stripper. Logic has very little to do with any of it.

Ironically I have to rule out television as a potential culprit for two reasons: 1) my kids watch our actual television almost not at all. It's an adorable old-timey thing dad insists on still doing, like using a cell phone to make a phone call or handling paper money; and 2) as people keep telling me, THIS IS THE GOLDEN AGE OF TELEVISION. Television is where High Culture now lives. I suppose we could explore if that's because television has gotten that much better as a mode of artistic expression or if our standards for what qualifies as artistic expression have dropped to the point that it now includes the medium that gave us Two and a Half Men, but it's winter and we're all already sunlight deprived... I'm not sure we can risk the push into further depression.

I'm sure our parents thought television was brain-rotting because they didn't grow up with it the same way we did, the latch-key GenXers, for whom it was companion, entertainer, babysitter and confidant. So far no television has ever given away the secrets I shared, except for the one time, but to be fair, that secret was the answer to Who Threw A Baseball At The Television?

Our mode of entertainment/self-preservation was the check out from the gross reality of Mom's New Boyfriend and check in with our pretend friends, The Hogan Family, whose lives seemed so much more manageable, even after the mom was horribly killed and their house was invaded by the monster with the googly eye. I'm sure from our parents' perspective it looked like physical and intellectual paralysis, but that's only because it was both of those things AND the deep, opiate satisfaction of emotional-social anesthetic. Sure, we weren't moving, but there was plenty going on, lots of which they couldn't possibly understand. This was new. This was ours.

And now it's my turn to not understand the things that keep my kids from paying attention to me. Right now a lot of it is YouTube. I don't know the names of the people who do it, partly because it's overwhelming and foreign to me as an old person and partly because OH MY GOD THERE ARE SO MANY. The model for content arrangement and strategies for consumption are so user-directed, that it's even less scrutable from the outside. At least when I was a kid, my mom had to guess what I was putting in my head using three broadcast networks and four independent local channels (we didn't get cable until high school). Now what breaks my head is that YouTube is so ubiquitous and simple, I could have a channel if I wanted to. Sadly I don't have the capacity to up-talk for long enough to sustain an entire YouTube video. The point is, the signal is coming from everywhere, literally everywhere, all at once.

It's not really that I think YouTube will rot my kids' brains. More than anything, it's that they're disappearing into this thing that I don't fully grasp, so we can't talk about it or share. It's a wall that exists between my children and me, between these babies who once looked to me for everything whether they were conscious of it** or not, and their poor, doddering old man. So I'm resisting the urge to knee-jerk vilify the thing I find threatening or confounding. And I do find YouTube to be a hugely entertaining and helpful resource, even if I don't really know the culture of it as a destination in and of itself.

But this, I guess, is how it's supposed to be. I become cranky and out of touch. The kids become more and more patiently dismissive of my crank-ism. I could do more to investigate and maybe understand. But that PewDiePie, that doesn't make any goddamned sense, right? That's not just me. Can't be.

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*mostly by people on television.

**or even conscious. I found I could often get the most done with a toddler while it was knocked out. Thanks again, Benadryl