THE SLACKER’S NEW ENEMY:

Gormless Gazing in a Candy Crush generation

First published: 37 Pieces of Flair (Exhibition Catalogue), October 2014

I was far from the most daring of children growing up in 1980’s England. But, before I’d picked up my first mobile phone (a Nokia 3310 when I was 19 years old) I had experienced my fair share of precarious adventures:

• On the day of my sisters holy communion I fruitlessly attempted to burn down our school with a half-empy box of matches.

• My friends and I frequently bought trays of eggs and distributed them with velocity at our neighbour’s homes.

• Aged 8 I defied safety precautions by refusing to remove my shell-suit and subsequently missed out on the village fireworks display. 

Yet, these examples are dangerous in that they threaten to present a glamorisation of my largely inactive youth which was otherwise largely boring.

As a child my desire for socialisation was limited. I struggled to sustain enthusiasm for my catholic education and my chubby physique reduced any confident progress in sports.

I was bored. Yet, this boredom was not necessarily as tragic as it may initially appear and, to a certain extent, I embraced it.

The first record I purchased with my own money was the 7-inch single ‘Leave Me Alone’ from the 1987 Michael Jackson LP ‘Bad’. The cover appropriately featured an image of Jackson adopting the epitome of boredom as punishment, behind bars, imprisoned, and attached to a ball and chain.  

Fast forward twenty-seven years or so to an age of non-stop information and communication sustained by Smart Phones and it is hard to imagine a child today following the same course of sustained boredom.

Now, in adulthood, I too am largely unfamiliar with the experience of boredom in my day-to-day life. Instead, I am endlessly wading through streams of digital information, emails, football results, holiday snaps of people I have not thought about in twenty years.

In an article published in The Observer’s Sunday magazine, avid Tweeter and former vocalist in the pop-punk bank band Kenickie, Lauren Laverne laments for time when she would regularly gaze out of windows.

Laverne admits to have replaced this ‘gormless gazing’ with staring at her phone in a habitual mode of online grazing, and warns us that whatever our poison - news, LOLZ, hate, shopping, porn, buzz feed quizzes - there is always more and never anybody to tell you when you have had enough.

Between Leisure and Work

Not so long ago, before this relentless interaction with the digital world, being bored - a largely unproductive space in-between the indulgences of leisure and the duties of work - was a daily encounter for most.

Boredom, as we have known it, has been largely defined by a dichotomy between leisure at one extreme, and the task-based activity of work at the other. A notion imposed by the work-ethic of the Industrial Revolution where ‘hard work’ breeds prosperity and ‘boredom’ has been established as an inconvenient nuisance.

To produce an active workforce necessary to develop the unprecedented growth and productivity of the industrial revolution, the gormless gazing which Laverne laments was widely characterised as a void which would be better filled with hard work and labour.

Yet, even at this time gormless gazing had its supporters.

In 1877 Scottish Poet and Novelist Robert Louis Stephenson published ‘An apology for Idlers’ to praise the significance of idleness, as a direct counter to the work ethic of the day claiming: whether at school or college, kirk or market, (extreme busy-ness) is a symptom of deficient vitality. Stephenson offers an understanding of boredom, or doing nothing, not as an inefficient void but as a significant act not recognised in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class.

Of the truant Stephenson proclaims:

“it is surely beyond a doubt that people should be a good deal idle in youth… if he prefers, he may go out by the gardened suburbs into the country. He may pitch on some tuft of lilacs over a burn, and smoke innumerable pipes to the tune of water on the stones. A bird will sing in the thicket. And there he may fall into a vein kindly thought, and see things in a new perspective. Why, if this not be education, what is?”

No One is Bored - Everything is Boring

In a recent article ‘No one is bored, everything is boring’ cultural theorist Mark Fisher claims that the success of neo-liberal capitalism and the subsequent failure of the traditional left are both tied up with the politics of boredom. Fisher asserts that neoliberal capitalism has successfully absorbed boredom, yielding an environment where we are endlessly exposed to the boring but never have the experience of feeling bored.  

“Even though we recognise that they are boring, we nevertheless feel compelled to do yet another Facebook quiz, to read yet another Buzzfeed list, to click on some celebrity gossip about someone we do not even remotely care about.”

Fisher argues that boredom is not necessarily a negative feeling that one simply wants rid of but an injunction and an opportunity - If we are bored, then it is for us to produce something that will fill up the space.

Now, however, within this non-stop environment of capitalist cyberspace, we are no longer afforded any time to idle or gormlessly gaze. Instead, we are inundated with a seamless flow of low-level stimulus where boredom has been replaced with perpetual anxiety and depression.

My affinity with Laverne’s lament is tied up with my own experiences of growing up in a village on the outside of two large towns waiting for busses that never seemed to arrive. I was born in 1982, and was 18 years old before I opened my first email account. Laverne was born in 1978, and she, like me was born into a generation for whom, despite MTV, Michael Jackson and Nintendo, boredom was still possible. Our kinship is one of shared membership to the last generation who navigated the route from childhood to adulthood undistracted by the 24-7 cyberspace where nothing ever stops.

Unlike following generations, what Laverne and I can significantly identify with is both the current trend of self-imposed online grazing, but also its otherness. We can better identify and question both the negative and positive implications of these experiences, because we have emerged and developed from a generation without them.  

So, what of the successive generations born with a touch screen in hand whose adolescence is in kinship with this relentless exposure to the digital world, where boredom is an unimaginable myth replaced with unending dopamine hits? 

In a recent study, conducted by psychologists at Virginia and Harvard Universities, several young adults were asked to disengage with the outside world (social, natural, and technological) by spending a period of 6-15minutes alone in a largely unadorned room.

This study concluded that most of the young adults preferred to self-administer electric shocks, that they had earlier said they would pay to avoid, rather than be alone with their thoughts for 15minutes. One man self-administered 190 electric shocks within the 15 minutes. A spokesperson from the universities surmised the study to have concluded:

‘Most young people seem to prefer to be doing something rather than nothing, even if that something is seen as a negative.’

Natalie Hanman, in an article published in 2005, recalls a time when sending a child to their bedroom was a punishment. Now, however, Hanman proposes that being sent to your bedroom is a teen dream where personal computers, mobile phones and gaming consoles are spurning antisocial angst for a culture of ‘connected cocooning.’ As anyone with a smart phone or iPad can affirm, the punishment no longer exists because the notion of ‘empty time’ or ‘boredom’ has been effectively eliminated (or filled) with social networking and endless video feeds.

From the birth of the telegraph pole to the to the most recent developments of ubiquitous computing Michael Bull, Professor in Sound Studies at the University of Sussex, argues that the age of mechanical reproduction is the age of mediation, where mediated experience is becoming second nature.

Bull argues that the auditory field produced through ‘technicized listening’ becomes a kind of personal space, where the experience of the public has become privatised. A space where rather than reaching out to understand otherness, we create an aesthetically pleasing urban world for ourselves in our own image.

Bull argues that the fundamental significance of this experience is not technological but cultural and alarmingly questions the consequences of future generations born into this mediated solipsism.  

In contrast to Laverne’s notion of looking out of the passenger window of a car, or Stephenson’s ‘truant slacker’, the effect of this 24-7 cyber attachment is a privatized world which excludes the external in absolute harmony with the individual’s mood, privatising the experience of the public, thus creating an aesthetically pleasing urban world for the individual in their own image.

The Propogation of Cultural and Political Trends

The Elementary Education act of 1870, which ensured the schooling and literacy of all children between the ages of 5-13 years in England and Wales, is an interesting example of how mass exposure to a particular technology (in this case books) can impact an entire generation.

Within this new generation of literate young people there arose a demand for literature and the of literature that arrived on mass was especially committed to instil traditional, puritan virtues. As Professor of English Literature Simon J. James points out:

“While so much of children’s reading matter from this period might now seem bloodthirsty, sexist, racist, or disrespectful towards the natural world, these books were nonetheless intended to shape their young readers into the adults whose qualities would help ensure Britain’s world pre-eminence for years to come.”

Thus, the newly integrated technology (literature) was purposely designed to propagate the existing cultural and political trends of the time; the long-term safeguarding of Imperial dominion. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, it was this first fully literate generation after the Elementary act, brought up on imperialist character tales, who in adulthood fought and died for queen and country in the First World War.

When Stephenson wrote ‘An apology for idlers’ it was seven years after the Elementary Education act of 1870.  Stephenson was endorsing an alternative form of education, perhaps known to man since the dawn of time, of idleness and gormless gazing. Perhaps an education that is not to be thought of as a substance with which the learner is to be filled, but one that can be obtained by navigating boredom from the subtle act of looking - it is all around about you, and for the trouble of looking, you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life.

The Slackers New Enemy

In praise of gormless gazing Lauren Laverne and Robert Louis Stephenson are by no means alone. From country walks to staying in bed for days on end or drinking oneself senseless in jovial company, the pointless pursuit of experienced boredom has had numerous advocates from Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Johnson, Herman Melville and Bertrand Russell among many, many, more. Yet within the lifetimes of all these named examples the common enemy, or the dichotic opposite to this non-activity, has been the work ethic monumentalised within the industrial revolution.

Now, with the rapid development of neoliberal capitalism and the disappearance of boredom I propose this cherished form of idleness lamented by Laverne and defended by Robert Louis Stephenson has a new and very different kind of enemy – the matrix of non-stop mobile technologies and the never-ending dopamine hits of social media and Candy Crush.

1. Lauren Laverne, Switch it off and give yourself a digital break. The Observer Sunday Magazine, Sunday 27 July 2014

2.   Robert Louis Stephenson, An Apology for Idlers. 1877

3.  Mark Fisher, No One is Bored, Everything is Boring. VAN, Monday 21 July, 2014

4.  Ian Sample, Shocking but true: students prefer jolt of pain to being made to sit and think. The Guardian, Thursday 3 July, 2014

5. Natalie Harman, Growing up with the wired generation. The Guardian, Thursday 10 November 2005

6. Michael Bull, The end of the Flanerie: iPods, Aesthetics, and Urban Experience. University of Sussex, 2012

7.   Simon J. James, Q is for Queen: Books for Boys, Literacy, Nation, and the First World War. Durham University, 2014