Slowing Down Doom

There's a common expression, probably going back over a thousand years, "The more I learn, the more I realise I don't know." A lot of people are very confident this quote comes from Albert Einstein. Google's AI says there's no record of Einstein actually saying it, despite a number of articles from the past five years or so attributing it to him. "The more I know, the more I realize I know nothing," is attributed by various sources online to Socrates or Aristotle. The more I google, the more I realise I don't know the source of the quote.

Plato's The Republic, which is basically Plato transcribing the ideas of Socrates, has this:

I left that enquiry and turned away to consider whether justice is virtue and wisdom or evil and folly; and when there arose a further question about the comparative advantages of justice and injustice, I could not refrain from passing on to that. And the result of the whole discussion has been that I know nothing at all. For I know not what justice is, and therefore I am not likely to know whether it is or is not a virtue, nor can I say whether the just man is happy or unhappy.

At any rate, it's a widely recognised truth. From this, we must realise that there are a lot of people in the world whose lack of knowledge is inversely proportional to the extent of knowledge they believe they possess. Many people who know little tend to believe they know everything, or at least everything important. I got to thinking about this yesterday when reading Caitlin R. Kiernan's journal in which she talked about encountering people who believed watching random assortments of TikTok videos was a superior experience to watching a full length movie. Quoting from Caitlin's journal:

So, this morning I'm taking some time off from work, and I'm paying the latest expansion to Guild Wars 2. I realize it's basically Raiders of the Lost Ark, which I mention in map chat. And two different people tell me they wouldn't know, because thet watch nothing longer than TikTok videos. Horrified, I look online, and surprise, this is not uncommon among Gen Z. Here's a post from Quora. But there is a LOT of this stuff, this attitude:

"Why would I watch a 1 hour long movie? I'd rather watch TikTok. On TikTok, I can watch 120 different videos in 1 hour. Watching a movie is like eating a 1 foot long bread, watching TikTok is like eating a diverse salad with meat in it."

By the way, I found out recently that many people in Japan don't understand the significance of italics so perhaps there are a number of people in foreign countries reading my blog who don't know that when a section of text is presented in italics it's meant to be a "block quote". That is to say, the long sections of this entry presented in italics, or the letters that are slanted to the right, are quotes and did not originate from me.

Anyway, Caitlin goes on to talk about neuroscientific studies that show the frequent viewer of TikTok videos suffers from brain degradation. I don't think one needs to produce scientific studies to show that viewing bundles of short TikTok, Instragram, or YouTube videos is not superior to the experience of viewing a full length movie. I also don't think the problem's as new as it seems, at least in terms of the layperson's perspective. The power and significance of art has always been widely underestimated. I've had conversations throughout my life where I've had to argue the significance of volume, the significant difference between watching a video with 30% of its original image cropped out and watching the original version, and the importance of colour proportions. But for this topic, I think the most significant, often overlooked issue is that of sequence.

Sequence matters. If you burn your eggs and spill your coffee in the morning, you're likely to go into work with a different mood. That probably seems obvious. But it's just as true that a piece of comedic media will have a different impact if it directly follows something frightening. This is where the term "comic relief" comes from. After tension has been built up over time, some writers and filmmakers find it useful to break up the tension with something funny. After characters spend some time running in the dark from the scary alien, maybe one of them makes an observation about how they never ran so fast in gym class. This is also a natural way for people to talk in stressful situations in order to relieve tension that might be otherwise debilitating. For the filmmaker or writer, sequence is another pigment on the palette. The filmmaker changes the significance of a scene where a wife embraces her spouse with genuine affection by placing it after a scene in which people coldly ignore each other on the train. The juxtaposition is a statement. Then, after the romantic scene, maybe we see another of the man going to a mistress for another embrace. That's another statement. Add one statement after another and you have a narrative and you have something that is different depending on whether it's shown over the course of two hours or over the course of 30 seconds. Paul Schrader, on his Facebook, was recently commenting on the phenomenon of YouTube films in which complicated narratives are presented in less than a minute. But of course, this is a different experience to a two hour film because a scene in such a film is also filled with a number of waypoints in other series of sequences. Imagine the scene of the married couple again. Does it start with the woman washing dishes? Or is she typing away at a laptop on the couch when the husband comes in? Does he take off a hat, is he wearing a shabby coat, does he clear his throat? Is there time before she chooses to acknowledge his presence? The length of time is also significant.

This also makes full length film an experience closer to real life than a TikTok video. We don't experience reality in isolated snippets, we experience it in sequences. Therefore cinema is an artform more in tune with the human experience, one from which we have a better chance of having a meaningful experience.