My watching took place on a shamefully short flight. Though a less carbon intense trip would have cost ten times as much and required a day-long ferry, one is, whatever the rationalization, either part of the problem or part of the solution.
Showing no more signs of climate guilt than anyone else, the young Japanese woman I saw in line and then sat next to was dressed as if in Kill Bill. A short white skirt, black leggings, and fluffy-fine white coat were all topped off by, or chosen because of, her two-tone black and white hair. (Small gold purse with a beaded black strap as accessory.) Whether that outfit constituted good style or not I am the least qualified person on earth to say, but no random getup was this. This was the look of a person who announces she does not do random when it comes to how she looks.
Can the same be said for what she looks at?
At the mercy of algorithms as we are, is anything random anymore?
You likely know the span of time between people getting on board, positioning their bags, squirming into their seats, ignoring the service and safety announcements, and when the mobile data finally ends at take off. With a thirty-second exception, this young woman spent every single moment of that twenty-minute span scrolling. Those thirty seconds—the first I spent sitting next to her—were used to say goodbye to an older gentleman, Dad presumably, who waved to her from the screen. She waved back. It is difficult not to think, in retrospect, that she wanted to let him know she was safely aboard and also get him off her phone so that she could do some “good” scrolling.
Good is in quotes because value of any kind is so hard to place, define or measure, both in terms of what she watched and her response to the watching. While I guess it was good for her, I’d rather judge her outfit at world fashion week than try to understand the world, or her, based on what she (and I) saw in those twenty minutes.
Twenty minutes, it must be said, of absolute focus. For the entire time, she did not look up and barely moved. Her left arm curled up to hold the phone beneath her face, her left thumb moving without disturbing any other part of herself. One has to be blessed with the strength of a young body to hold such a position for so long and so well. Maybe an elder marathoner or senior Yogi could pull it off, but her posture alone made me want to ring the bell for a flight attendant.
She generally spent five or ten seconds with each of the videos she watched. A few she swiped away after but a moment. The three or four times she liked something her right hand got called into use, which offered further indication she was alive. But other than that only her left thumb was animate and she always stared straight down. If her eyes could blink, I saw no evidence of it.
As I write this I am aware I must sound nosy at best and voyeuristic at worse. But in fact, I felt neither. So well fixed was her state of fixation that I doubt she would have noticed if I had played with her tray table or snipped a lock of her hair.
You could say she was looking deeply into an all-seeing eye, or the mirror of everything. I might guess something like that is what she thinks. Or not at all. Because I would recognize more in the online feed of a Wahabi fundamentalist than the stuff this placid young woman looks at. She may as well have been from a long-lost tribe of people discovered on an island last week for all I identified in her feed.
Yes, there were cat videos, singers, and models, but I knew none of the people whose primp and preen suggested they expected to be known. There were also cartoons of a kind and people floating in obviously cartoonish space as well, though which cartoons and what space I could not begin to say. A fair number of the people she scrolled through were operating in real space and yet as if they knew they would be scrollable. In every case, what they were actually doing remained a mystery. I did not see anyone cook anything or paint anything or talk to one another as people do in the real world or, for that matter, at a desk or in chairs in the manner I associate with the world of media I absorb.
Was it all hallucinatory and dreamlike? Yes, but also no. I can kind of point to and describe the hallucinatory and dreamlike. This was distinct from either.
Maybe if the text had been in English rather than Japanese or I had access to the sound I would have recognized more, but I doubt it.
As it happens, the video she spent the most time with, a full twenty seconds, is also the only one I can speak about. Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man showed up so it must have been from a Marvel movie, though to me the clip looked wrong, as if an AI program had augmented it to make everything appear more kaleidoscopic and narrow. But maybe not. Maybe my unwillingness to treat Marvel films as essential means I have no more sense of what makes source material and what constitutes an obvious derivative. I sometimes ask the question: What should a synthesizer sound like? Well, was the visual gaffe concerning Iron Man what I saw or my inability to see how it was a deliberate visual gaffe? What should an animated character look like when played by a real person who is then meme-ified? Does anything matter when its only purpose is to be seen? To have been seen?
Still, what would have been the one cornerstone of connection between her world and mine—superhero movies pitched to the seventh grader in all of us—crumbled into a last shard of babel.
Once we were airborne and she could no longer scroll she did change her position slightly. But her phone remained in her hand for the entirety of the flight. She wanted to be ready as soon as the wifi came back, I imagined, to get back to the scroll. And upon touchdown, this is what she did.
Who needs fascism when an entire generation is addicted to watching things that don't matter?