"With thousands of freely distributed tracks, the “rare” hashtag has a
strange and humorous meaning in relation to availability and value, referring
to more traditional models of marketing music collectables, appealing
to these same desires, the devotion of a focused completionist,
replicated within the logic of torrenting / mixtape collecting.... Beyond Motown’s hit factory, Lil B spills
out excesses, to an audience just as compulsive in its collecting as Lil B
is in his abundance of production. Lil B as a schizophrenic bubbling submersion
in the internet (he claims to spend 22
hours a day online), a frantic liquid – I’m thinking of the end scene in Terminator 2 here –
as process or conduit of the internet catalysing more forms, and as vomiting up
of identities. An output which puts an impossible demand of collecting,
consuming, contemplation for another world where more time is available? "
Sunday, July 22, 2012
"I used to think this obsession was
mine alone. But now nearly everyone I know — and by that I mean everyone who
spends vast, barren tundras of time at her computer — goes to Web sites like
these to escape, destress, perk up, calm down, feel something, not feel
something, distract themselves and (they don’t call it “lifestyle pornography”
for nothing) modulate pleasure and arousal. A friend of a friend calls his
addiction to sites like these “avenues for procrastination,” but I think
there’s something else involved. Like other forms of pastiche — the mix tape,
the playlist, the mash-up — these sites force you to engage and derive meaning
or at least significance or at the very least pleasure from a random grouping
of pictures. Why not dive into an alternative world full of beauty and novelty
and emotion and the hard-to-put-your-finger-on feeling that there’s something
more, somewhere, where you’re not chained to your laptop, half dead from
monotony, frustration and boredom?"
"Perhaps there’s a neurological
component to all this; to the sudden rise of the mood board as mood regulator,
a kind of low-dose visual lithium. And have no fear, the new field of
neuroaesthetics, which investigates the neural basis for aesthetic experience,
is all over it.... what we’re seeking while idly yet
compulsively cruising Pinterest is really just the reliably unpredictable
jumble of emotions that their wistful, quirky juxtapositions evoke...
"There’s a German word for it, of
course: Sehnsucht, which translates as “addictive yearning.” This is, I
think, what these sites evoke: the feeling of being addicted to longing for
something; specifically being addicted to the feeling that something is missing
or incomplete. The point is not the thing that is being longed for, but the
feeling of longing for the thing. And that feeling is necessarily ambivalent,
combining both positive and negative emotions. A paper titled “What Is It We Are Longing For?” ... breaks down these “life longings” into
essential characteristics. They target aspects of our lives that “are
incomplete or imperfect”; involve “overly positive, idealized, utopian
imaginations of these missing aspects”; focus on “incompleteness on the one
hand and fantasies about ideal, alternative realities on the other hand”;
result in a “temporarily complex experience” combining “memories of the past,
reflections on the imperfect present and fantasies about an idealized future”
(this is called “tritime focus”); and that “make individuals reflect on and
evaluate their life, comparing the status quo with ideals or successful
others.
"In other words, your average Pinterest board or inspiration Tumblr basically functions as a longing machine."
