Denial and "Lost"

One of the take-aways from Matt Stockton’s “Television and the Presentation of Reality” class at PCC was a mental note to myself to critically assess “Lost,” a TV series Matt recommended for its complex, involving plotlines.

It’s about marooned plane crash victims…and then some.

I started to watch the first episode (replete with the gore, confusion and mayhem at the crash site) but allowed myself to be distracted when the script came unhinged. A doctor describes his botched surgery in a monologue that compares his doomed patient’s spinal fluid to angel hair spaghetti.

I mean really.

I may get back to “Lost,” but right now, and for the indefinite future, I have better things to do.

Maybe it’s just where I am in life. Maybe multiple TV episodes are for the young and their seemingly endless lives. Or maybe they are for those who really don’t have anything better to do. That’s harsh, I know, but I’ll put it out there for consideration.

Thoughts like this take me to Robert Grudin’s magnificent book “Time and the Art of Living.” You can pretty much dip into it anywhere.

Here’s were I dipped today. It’s about how our failures to act are as important as our actions. The notion isn’t unrelated to the above.

“….time keeps nothing with as deadly care as the ledger of our omissions. This is nowhere as apparent as in our personal relationships. We lose what is valuable in these — love, joy, communality — less through conflict and tragedy than through long series of shadowy and often unconscious refusals. Withdrawing, forgetting, falling out of touch, ignoring or avoiding or withholding the unpretentious but essential details of friendship, destroy more relationships than death or anger and tend to isolate their perpetrators quite early in the solitary confinement of old age. To the Latin adage Qui tacit consentit (‘He who is silent consents’), we might add another, Qui non agit negat (‘He who does not act, denies’)”

To me, at this point in my life, watching episode after episode of “Lost” denies.

Escape from the Electronic Cave

“Television and the Presentation of Reality,” Philosophy 197, is a Portland Community College course being taught this summer by Matt Stockton, a young philosophy instructor well versed in contemporary media.

My friend Joan Rutkowski and I are both active in the media literacy movement so we went out to the Rock Creek PCC campus to meet Matt and to attend the first class.

Matt told the 16 or so students that the course is really was about media literacy.

The syllabus description lays out some of the dimensions of the subject. Electronic media, Matt writes, “has emerged as the most popular source of information concerning our perspectives of reality.” He notes that the 2000 census reported the average American spends nearly 1,600 hours a year watching television. That’s about 4.25 hours a day, or 29 percent of our waking hours.

Philosophy 197 looks like a great class. I came away from my visit with two or three new ideas, not the least of which is that our expectations shape (Matt actually said expectations “dictate”) our experience.

Of course, the media are all about shaping expectations — about appearance, about resolving conflict (usually violently), about the meaning of success (the one with the most toys wins), about time and its value, about entitlement, about knowledge and about what is “cool” or not “cool.”

More than shaping experience, media expectations shape our values, our decisions, our lives.

Matt put it another way too. We are born into a world with a gap between who (or what) we are and who (or what) we want to be. Media managers and advertisers happily fill that gap for their own purposes.

But this is a philosophy course and the first class wasn’t without its philosophy, in this case Plato’s Cave Analogy, which, when you reconsider it, is a pretty good description of our relationship with media.

You’ll recall that Plato describes a situation in which a group of people is confined from birth in a cave so that all they can see are shadows cast on a wall. (Think, very big screen but no cable fee.) The shadows are what the prisoners understand to be reality. One day a member of the group escapes only to find that the shadows, far from being reality, are really images made by a person standing in front of a fire and manipulating the shadows. Any escapee who leaves the cave and its manipulated images will find a “new” “true” reality.

Through understanding, discussion and critical thinking, the students in Phl 197 may be on the verge of their own escape.

That is what media literacy is all about.