“Channel 1’s no fun.
Channel 2’s just news.
Channel 3’s hard to see.
Channel 4 is just a bore.
Channel 5 is all jive.
Channel 6 needs to be fixed.
Channel 7 and Channel 8 –
Just old movies, not so great.
Channel 9’s a waste of time.
Channel 10 is off, my child.
Wouldn’t you like to talk awhile?”
I was recently reading Shel Silverstein’s 1981 publication A Light in the Attic to my children when I came across his poem “Channels” and realized that not everything holds up well.
This. This changed everything.
We – none of us – move through a world where our technology is not at our fingertips any longer.
Consequently, I had to explain to my children what “channels” were. My youngest keeps calling this the “steps” poem because it has numbers, like steps in a process. He has literally no association with channels to what you can watch on TV. And so, play, too, looks different. Creativity looks different. We’re the strict parents who closely monitor and limit screen time. None of my children has their own device. We share a single iPad that is rarely out. Even so, you’ll notice that all three of my children are interacting with a different device. One is playing a word game on the iPad. One is playing an Occulus VR game, and the third is watching what they’re seeing on the laptop or TV. Our world just looks different.
Such is the age of the new aesthetic, which, according to Hodgsen is “overtly concerned with the human-object or human-nonhuman collaborations – particularly those, as filmmaker and speculative fictionist Jonathan Minard argues, that provide “access [to] new experiences and augment our creative capacities.” (p. 63)
“Ulmer argues that oral cultures took shape along an axis of right and wrong, and literate cultures on an axis of true and false, but electrate cultures operate on a Nietzschean axis of pleasure and pain – with the latter tied not to a moral condition, nor to a reasoned imposition, but rather to a life-aesthetic and experientiality. Holmevik argues that it is the very experiences of affect that electracy and the larger considerations of digital rhetoric attempt to augment (and/or invent with). This is why turning to play is essential for Holmevik, because play has long been grounded in affect.” (p. 139).
As the world shifts, so too, must we. We may struggle to find the balance between the old and the new. We merge our technology with our lives. We find ourselves in the ways that we always have.
But we may never go back to channels on the TV
