Modern Relationships

“How do you get so empty? What takes it out of you?” That’s what Montag, the distraught fireman in Fahrenheit 451, asks as he begins to understand the hollow, media-saturated future-America in which he lives. It’s a society under constant assault from banality, where giant television screens serve up best friends and no one ever talks about anything at all. Shallow, numbing media has become a drug, and social disconnection is the norm. It is, in fact, encouraged.

Now, clearly, in our age of reality TV and 102" plasma screens, this hits close to home. But a recent NYT story on the burgeoning Japanese trend of media immersion pods brings it even closer:

In Tokyo, though, the antidote to urban overload is more of the same. In the world's most media-saturated city, people take a break by checking themselves into media immersion pods: warrens cluttered with computers, TV's, video games and every other entertainment of the electronic age.

The Bagus Gran Cyber Cafés are Tokyo's grand temples of infomania. Situated well above retail level, on the odd floor number where in Manhattan you might find tarot readers or nail salons, these establishments contain row after row of anonymous cubicles. At first glance the spread looks officelike, but be warned: these places are drug dens for Internet addicts.
[snip]

Gran Cyber Cafés are enshrouded in the urgent, furtive atmosphere of a hot-sheet motel. Eyes averted, customers sign in, head to the library of entertainment options, and load up on fashion magazines, video games and DVD's of "24" as if stocking up on Jim Beam. Then they beetle-brow it to their solitary pods. What they do there is up to them. Some people channel-surf. Others trade stocks. You can download music, read novels, watch pornography, play video games, have sex, go to sleep.

If this seems to be a typical Japanese phenomenon, we have our American equivalents. Coffee shops with wi-fi provide a place to be by yourself in public. Power up a laptop and you can sit for hours at a time with a quad espresso mocha and a library’s worth of digital reading material—soon to be an actual library—just a few clicks a way. For those with an attachement to the printed word—or who lack the resources to buy a laptop—book megastores are open late (they too sell coffee, clearly the thoughtful loner’s drink of choice). Visit any of the major book chains at 10 p.m. on a Friday and you’re likely to see dozens of young men and women aimlessly strolling the aisles, alone, in public, unable to stray too far from the created, controlled worlds of managed words and images.

Perhaps an even more significant factor is that, in typical American fashion, we’re all encouraged to build media immersion pods of our own. Home theater systems that cost as much as luxury cars and expansive movie and music libraries are the new marks of the rich and well-cultured aesthetic elite as well as the fetish of collector-types everywhere. Where people used to aspire to have read a library’s worth of great books, now they aspire to own a Blockbuster’s worth of DVDs. Who needs a girlfriend or a wife when you can have a Playstation 3? The home is no longer the castle; it is the concert hall, virtual reality complex, and movie theater.

And no question: it’s empowering. Sitting on top of his mountain of DVDs in front an array of components, every man is Zeus, the remote control his thunder bolts. You can be god of your own little world—but at the expense of participating in anyone else’s. How do you get so empty? Maybe this is how.