Reflections Of A Child Of Chaos
(Inspired By Douglas Rushkoff's Children Of Chaos – www.amazon.com)
Having read the first chapter of a new book by the popular media commentator (if that is how he should be described as his themes of writing seem almost as chaotic as the society he describes) Douglas Rushkoff I realise that, I am the exact product he was attempting to describe.
It didn't hit me at first, at first I was reading the chapter through my own eyes, absorbing the information, processing and storing it for future use. Then, after sitting and thinking about the pages I had just read I stepped back and viewed the text through a psychological looking glass. Like Alice I fell to Wonderland.
You see, I remember a very specific time when I was 13, sitting in the living room with my parents watching an episode of a Sunday night drama series about rural life in Yorkshire or somewhere like that. I had watched the show for weeks with my parents, it was almost a tradition now, the stories each week were more or less the same, little inventiveness and hardly inspiring. So one night, with the remote control in hand, I flicked channels to see what else was on. The resulting argument because I had interrupted the program, and thus my parents were going to lose track of the story, inspired me to ask for a TV for my next birthday. Looking back at it, I was controlled by my parents and they seemed controlled by years of logical, conditioned and predictable TV.
Thinking about my watching habits, both as child and now adult, as well as my litreature reading gives even more depth to what Douglas Rushkoff is talking about. I didn't read the normal books recommended by the school library when I was young, I read the surreal and non-linear Hitch-hikers Guide To Galaxy, I rolled dice and chose my own path on the Final Fantasy and Choose Your Own Adventure books. Later I began to write my own works of fiction, perhaps itself a rebellion against the somewhat stale and linear books being forced at me in English. Eventually my teacher encouraged me not to read or write about the books the curriculum told me too, but to write my own. So instead of reading about an English servant and English Lord in a A-B-C novel, I'm reading stories about inter-dimensional rifts in the space-time continuum.
Jump forward eight years and I the UK
now has Cable TV and myself along with other people. I channel hop,
taking in pieces and fragments in exactly the same style that
Rushkoff describes, I am quite disturbed by just how
The most inspired piece of anime in recent years Serial Experiments Lain opened my eye to theories and ideas that I had never experienced, the collected nature of the world and the people living on it. The networked status of society on the backbone of The Wired in Lain are but small steps when we consider the ramifications of the developing of media in the last fifty years or so. As an interesting sideline, Lain, which was partially inspired by the writings in Douglas Rushkoff's Cyberia, in turn inspired me to seek out Rushkoff's book and then to purchase several more, the idea had come full circle perhaps.
But Lain, viewed by may as a non-linear and messy series, or just as a silly cartoon by those who do not watch anime, is itself the exact kind of media that Rushkoff discusses. Take a look at it, each episode is a sequence of non-linear snippets of information, tiny pieces of information is given away in each scene, dip into an episode or just show one person a single episode and the result is confusion. Sit somebody down for all 13 and the sequence comes whole and it is understood. However, very few people can hold onto the pieces long enough, it took me several viewings before I could pick up everything that I perceive Lain to be saying. But, like Blade Runner, before it, nobody has exactly the same viewpoint to Lain. Just the other day I was talking to a guy in Oregon, who's outlook on Lain was different to mine. It is almost as if the creators wanted confusion and doubt in the minds of those watching Lain, it truly is a product of chaos, to some it is random, nonsense, but those who look closely see a similar pattern, just slightly different.
For those reading this article, I am subjecting you to a similar kind of non-linear, I started out about Douglas Rushkoff's book, about how I, appear to be a child of this chaotic generation, then moving onto Lain, but while the two items aren't directly connected they are, Rushkoff's theories and Lain are linked bi-directionally and I, and you, are intertwined with them. I have been channel hopping with this article.
Take a step back and look at yourself and how your mind works, do you absorb the plot-twists and confusion inherent to films like Total Recall, Momento and Lain itself or are you content with the A-B-C world of Sunday night rural drama?
Remember, we are all connected. Some more than others.
The Reflections Of A Child Of Chaos
Copyright Jody Armstrong 2001
jody.armstrong@ntlworld.com