Outsourcing Fictions

Illustration by Ayo Arogunmati

Each day we move through two state spaces, the state of being awake and that of sleep. Although the 24 hours in a day is split between waking and sleeping, much of that time is better described as a dream state coordinated by sources described as media. Media is an extension of the dream state. A result of media planners relentless chase to fill our time with endless supply of music, film, and podcasts. The evolution of media technology has also multiplied these sources, embedding their product into our every metered moment.

In his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man, Marshall Mcluhan said that the "personal and social consequences result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology", and with the scale of new media technology like social media, the consequences that are often discussed are those that are social, primarily how it affects our interaction with others. The personal consequences are less clear because the effect is on our dreams, a state space that occurs when we are less conscious.

I think media technology from speech to books, radio, television and social media results in a competition for not only our conscious attention but also our unconscious dreams. The control we previously had over our dreams is eroded by each incremental change in media technology.

We spend thousands of hours per year filling our minds and attention through different media technologies, but fail to see that these devices are gateways to outsourcing our dreams. Each minute in 2020, time allocated was estimated to be more than 400,000 hours of video on YouTube, and 2700 people installed TikTok. If we want to experience a feeling of pain, love, fear, anxiety and relaxation, we can scan the choices, similar to a grocery store, and pick what we crave for the moment.

This outsourcing of dreams can be satisfied in bite sizes or big chunks in the form of reels or long form podcasts. In this megastore of choice, where do our own creation of new state spaces get formed? And if we’ve decided to let these platforms paint the canvas for us, how do we separate good art from entertainment when the two can sometimes overlap?

When we are awake, we are in a state of the specific. Time and space can't differ much, making it easier to have a fixed model of our world. We predict and infer with much more confidence in our waking state. We try to sense who might be dangerous, when to leave a bad environment, and which areas not to visit.

Dreams are opposite. They generalize, place us in different status positions and confuse our sense of self. Dreams are there to stop us from overfitting our waking existence. Imagine if we couldn't dream, the idea of moving from one social status to the next might not be possible. Dreams in a sense might be our true existence as it removes the friction of overfitting all the data we aggregate in our waking state to a world of specificity. Dreams alter our categorical self.

Media planners know the importance of dreams and its juxtaposition to the state of being awake, so they offer us an overflow of fiction before, during and after we exercise, work, commute and do chores.

The outsourced dream is now easier to consume, carry around and share with others. These fictions help us stop overfitting our specific world. The structured hero is likely the most recognized form of fiction. The structured hero in books, films and social media follows the same pattern - a call to adventure, the protagonist meets a mentor who guides him or her, a fall from grace and finally a transformation. This structured hero fits any context imagined and plays strongly into the dreams we outsource.

How do we tell the good art from just entertainment? I think we have to turn to our artists, the story tellers, to understand and differentiate between the two.

Artists occasionally ask their fans to take an action. This could be an invite to a live show, a request to purchase their work of art, but sometimes they’ll ask their fans to stop a particular behavior, for example stealing music. Piracy is no longer prevalent because platforms have figured out a way to get media to fans in a cheaper and more efficient way, but artists continue to express their dissatisfaction about their share of the value on these platforms. Artists tell their fans what not to do, but rarely show them through story telling.

Dave Chapelle, on the other hand, made a request to his fans to stop watching the Dave Chapelle Show through story telling. He starts off his comedy show saying "here's a story", and proceeds to tell us about him as a young boy getting scammed in different places by big men. The first story was in a casino, a most scammy place, a place where we all get sucked. He continues to tell more stories in which he was the small person trying to get what was rightfully his. We can’t verify the truthfulness of the stories, but we are fine with the fiction because the stories are generalizable.

Dave Chapelle became the outlet to outsource our dreams of justice, fairness and success. He takes us through the hero's journey without telling us that we as audience members are the protagonists. At the end of his show, he asks the audience to take an action against the networks to get control of his show. It worked. We became the heros.

So good art should make us the protagonists in the fiction. The good artist must find a way to make us the hero in their created experiential state space. They are our outlet for outsourcing our own diminishing ability to dream and experience another state space.

Media planners want to coordinate this process for us, and it is getting harder to fight back. While it would be good to stop consuming all planned media, it is impossible to do in a connected world. We can't fight the excessive media junk food, but we can try to separate good art from entertainment.

A way to good art is to find those artists that are able to reach inside of us and push us to explore another part of ourselves. Dave Chapelle did that by putting us in places where we are often taken advantage of, like a casino. The art must make us more sensitive, more empathetic and more intelligent. We can usually tell the difference when we see it, feel it and move into this experiential state space.

Notes

[1] Understanding Media: Extensions of Man by Marshall Mcluhan

[2] Adrift - Scott Galloway

[3] Enter the Supersensorium - Erik Hoel