Friday, January 17, 2014

Not with a Bang but a Twitter

Five boys, three hand-held electronic diversions; with two other boys (not pictured) across the aisle, each texting
I see them all crowding around a small common point of interest, like the wise men and shepherds in countless paintings of the adoration in the manger, or the apostles transfixed by the sight of Thomas touching the wound of the risen Christ, and find myself thinking of a slightly altered version of T.S. Eliot's famous last four lines in "The Hollow Men": 

This is the way a culture ends
This is the way a culture ends
This is the way a culture ends
Not with a bang but a twitter.

A detail of Veronese's "Adoration" in SS Giovanni e Paolo
For they, the Venetian boys I'm talking about, are huddled around nothing miraculous--at least not compared to the city all around them, the fantastical product of long centuries of hard improbable labor, which they as young natives are entitled to ignore--but hand-held electronic devices. Video games, usually: and the exact same games that other boys are playing everywhere else in the world, their rapt faces softly illuminated by the glowing device like those of those painted visitors in the manger, beholding their small Savior.

I remember Tiziano Scarpa's description in Venice Is a Fish of the Venetian childhood games he played growing up in the city: massa e pìndolo, tacco, s'cioco e spana, and scainèa, to name just a few (the last of them played on pissote, the humped masses of bricks and plaster filling the obscure angles of the city's architecture, intended to prevent urination). Scarpa was born in 1963, and admits that he was of the last generation to play such games. By the time his book was published in 2000 he could describe such diversions as "ghosts," dead and gone and unknown by the young.   

(The whole idea of games specific to a region or locale is so quaint now as to seem almost far-fetched, though the 12-year-old son of my cousin in Piemonte was, until recently, playing in a  youth pallapugno league, a traditional sport played only around the provinces of Asti, Cuneo, and Savona: http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pallapugno).   

A detail of Caravaggio's "The Incredulity of St Thomas"
Such Venetian games, in other words, had disappeared well before smart phones and tablets and all the rest became ubiquitous, even in Italy, and even in the hands of children. But I find myself less preoccupied with any kind of mourning for the disappearance of such traditional games as I watch Venetian kids in vaporetti and fermatte and sometimes even playgrounds(!) huddled around electronic devices, than with wondering about the future. What other cultural traditions, more essential even than childhood games, might disappear in a population raised with such devices? 

I watch a group of Venetian kids or adolescents or young adults all together but worlds apart, each lost in his or her own tiny screen, and I wonder can la passeggiata continue to exist with such technology, such habits, maybe even such addictions?

Maybe the passeggiate, those nightly strolls, those daily does of what Beppe Severgnini calls "social therapy," matter more to me as an American coming from a country of extraordinary isolation beneath a smiley-face mask of anxious, almost coercive friendliness and institutionalized get-togethers, than to Italians themselves. Maybe the loss of such an old-fashioned manner of being together is a small price to pay to be technologically of the moment and in the know.
   
And maybe in Venice, where, according to a recent local newspaper headline, senior citizens outnumber children by a 6 to 1 ratio, the city's living culture is sadly reaching its end in any case, with or without the enthralling distractions of smart phones and the like.

10 comments:

  1. I almost lost it a couple weeks ago, almost said something harsh to the colleague - we were celebrating her birthday at the office, and she was unable to tear herself away from her iPhone, checking Facebook, renewing the page twice a minute. We tried to deal with it by commenting jokingly on her immersion, she smiled faintly - not taking the eyes from the screen.

    We, 7 adult person, were standing before her, making compliments, congratulating the birthday girl. But it was obviously second-rate to what was happening to her virtual self in FB - and she just couldn't make herself take an hour off.

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    1. That's a remarkable, sad, and, yes, understandably maddening story, Alex (Sasha? Which do you prefer?). It makes me think of something the director John Cassavetes said in an old interview: "We gossip about life now rather than actually live it." This was back in the late '60s, if I remember correctly, from an interview at the time of FACES. Now it seems we market ourselves as "brands" rather than live. FB is the perfect medium for such branding, whereas real life is just too messy--to hard to control our self-presentation. As, after all, we all agree that self-presentation is the only thing that matters in life, no?

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    2. Sasha is so rare in this part of blogosphere so let's stick with that name:)

      Here is a photo of the girls on their trip to L.A., posted by one of my LiveJournal friends. It's very telling;

      http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/rudirinka/16159441/1120374/1120374_900.jpg

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    3. That's a great picture, Sasha. A true portrait of the time we live in, and the way we live today.

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  2. I remember a couple of summers ago being fortunate enough to get tickets to see Sting in St Marks Square for my birthday but was horrified at how the majority of Italians spent the concert checking facebook - the light from which was very annoying when sat next to the person. I could'nt help thinking they could have saved their money and just listened to a CD at home as they were not watching - but then I remembered that it was a long time since I had been to a concert in the UK and probably the same happens here now.

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    1. It seems the central question for some time has been: Are we actually having an experience if we are not posting it on FB or some other social media site or app?

      Just to be contradictory, I'd now suggest that perhaps one good measure of our experience is whether it CAN'T be posted on FB etc. If it exceeds it, and must remain only ours--or only ours and those with whom we immediately experience it.

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    2. My son tells me he sees more and more people at the rock concerts that are totally absorbed in broadcasting the show to the FB, etc using their gadgets, and they don't look at the stage at all.

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    3. Can we at least credit such folks with a certain "selflessness", Sasha? Or is "mindlessness" the term that many people would apply to them?

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  3. So appreciate of this beautiful post, that has enthralled me. Memory, tradition, culture, technology, art, and poetry ~ all wrapped up in a gaggle of boys. Grazie mille.

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    1. Thank you, JoAnn. I was worried I was simply being an old grump, and your kind comment suggests that that's perhaps not all I was doing.

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