Judgment Daze.

At five years old I had no electronics. We had electric light, I’m not that old, and a radio but that was it. Everything I did was physical. At 13 we had 2 hours of Saturday morning cinema, The Lone Ranger, which constituted our weekly diet of entertainment. Even graduating at twenty-one there was only TV but I was too busy. In the intervening fifty years average weekly entertainment hours have soared from 2 to 35 and now with fifty shades of social media in your pocket anywhere anytime it’s exploded even further to, and this is only a guess on my part, over 90% of our free awake time. That’s around 50 hours of being audio/visually entertained a week, or to put it another way less than 6 hours of what I used to spend 6o hours a week doing when I was 21: that being musing, learning and doing whatever I wanted. As a result I have a long list of competences and things I love doing. All very well but that’s not what this is about. Being entertained is a very special situation where we are the receiver. The onus is on the entertainer to skilfully satisfy the entertainee with whatever tricks and devices he or she has learnt over the years. He or she can only display their wares and hope, knowing full well any whinging about audience quality will not go down well. The audience is king and queen of the situation and thus enthroned will feel free to clap or boo as the mood takes us. We can change channel, unsubscribe, un-friend or in one form or another hurl abuse with little thought for restraint. So with 60 hours a week in this sovereign situation we have become fully fledged X Factor judges to a man, or woman. We watch, decide and proceed directly to our unchallengeable binary opinion; thumbs up or thumbs down. Now history suggests this imperial infallibility inevitably leads to mental illness where one either loses one’s mind or in more serious circumstances one’s whole head. Going forward this is not a good plan. This whole Brexistential phenomenon is a case in point. Everyone is a judge with a cast iron verdict, movement is impossible, agreement implausible and, well basically it just comes down to ‘who’s holding the remote’, and we all know who that is: Mothermouse, or, in a wider context, Facebook.