Ever since I was a little kid growing up in the States, I was highly engaged by television. A little too highly. Yeah, that rotten black box with the fictional people and their fictional lives inside. You can forget yours, why live yours when you can watch theirs?
This is possibly one of the scariest aspects of the entertainment industry. Entertainment can go beyond occasional amusement to complete and total consumption of your life. The consumer is consumed by the box. The brain matter is wasted: simulating the lives of others, you live your own that much less. Your mirror neurons allow you to experience a percentage of that luscious, thrilling kiss between the two beautiful lovers, the pathways activating your lips, tongue muscles and salivary glands are lit up, your heart too, palpitates a little. You feel a percentage of the heat and love on the screen, the excitement, pain, fury, happiness, anticipation -- you are living their created lives.
Possible hypothesis and question: are those of us with more active mirror neurons, with a higher capacity for empathy, more susceptible to tv shows and soaps? After all, that could explain why some people get lured in more than others. Why some of us swoon with the characters from the get-go while others are relatively unaffected and uninterested.
There is quite likely at least a correlation here, more empathy = more soap-susceptibility.
The second key ingredient that sucks viewers in is the ongoing storyline. An ongoing storyline is like a life, it goes on and on, there is no definite end (as with a movie,) those characters continue to exist and they ask you to exist with them. It's scary, they're asking to be incorporated into your life, you into theirs. Suddenly, 6pm central time on Tuesday, you are no longer you, you are Rori Gilmore, you are Hiro Nakumura. You are sucked in. That's why there are "favorite characters." They're not just favorites, they are us, we are them; we love them because more than anything we want to be them, we want to live their lives. And at 6 o'clock central time we do.
All through college I had no tv access and did beautifully, and I was happy to be living tv-free, to be filling my free time with much more fulfilling things - books, people, places, poetry. During the two years after college I watched on occasion but not so much, I watched films a lot more but I didn't get too tv-happy and this was excellent. I got into the Colbert Report and the Daily Show which I used to watch during lunch breaks at one of my admin gigs and that was about it. A life not too intruded upon by fictional tv people.
Then during this past difficult, stressful first PhD year, (also the first year that I have lived completely alone,) when alone and tired I have been sucked into the streaming tv shows online and this is a habit I need to kick, hard. I think I'm particularly sucked in by shows about powerful women, superwomen more or less: Ugly Betty, Dollhouse, Alias, Heroes, Desperate Housewives, United States of Tara. (All of these shows and their gorgeoug no-bullshit female characters entered my life this year, and superficially filled the emotional gaps for episodes and seasons at a time.) This way, I can pretend that I'm kicking the world's ass when when I'm not, I'm just sitting on mine. Important note: these superwomen have very full social lives and no time to mope around in their studios, I was going on their dates, living their romances, and advancing their careers....
It's a catch, a terrible one. Particularly in this modern lonely tuna can existence. It's an easy drug, a virtual world where all the lines have been written, there is no need to stress, it will all be done for you, lived for you.
Kick it, destroy it, stop it. Be the superwoman instead of watching her, or at least be the woman, that can be more than enough.
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