Option: Paralysis.

Recently, cult heros of noise and precision The Dillinger Escape Plan released the long anticipated Option Paralisis to both critial and peer acclaim. The bands vocalist Greg Puciato was questioned about the meaning behind and content within the album. I find his opinions and the album a great exapmple of contemporary social commentary. The following is a segment of an interveiw between Shockhound Music and Puciato.

SHOCKHOUND: What does the term Option Paralysis mean to you?

PUCIATO: Technically, it's a term that was coined a few decades ago. It refers to one's tendency, when given a ton of choices, to make none. I think it's a good phrase to sum up not only what's going on in the world, but in many of our personal lives — certainly my personal life at times when we were writing the record. Culturally, it seems very apropos. Right now, there have been some amazing technological feats. Over the past 100 years, we've come much further industrially and technologically than we have in the entire course of human history. However, I feel like, as far as arts and culture are concerned, we may have never been at a lower point. I'm not saying that there's a necessarily inverse relationship, but I think that maybe some of the focus needs to shift back to an enlightened way of thinking where education and art are valued for their intrinsic benefits, and not just as means to a marketing end or to serve as a tie-in to some new product. When we were talking about album titles, Option Paralysis just felt good. It made sense.

SHOCKHOUND: Everything gets filtered through the internet — Twitter, Myspace, Facebook, etc. How many people actually still experience real art without these technological filters?

PUCIATO: That's what it's about! Technology is amazing. I'm not saying that I'd want to discard my phone or the internet, but people haven't learned how to say no. There are so many new things coming out constantly and the novelty aspect is extremely high. The users haven't learned how to restrain themselves, and they don't understand how the consequences of their daily actions affect everything as a whole. If you're a kid, you probably want to eat candy and ice cream for every meal all day and only drink soda. As a kid, you have no real idea as to why that wouldn't be good for you in the large scale, because you can only really see what's in front of your face. I think that's what people are doing now. They don't understand the repercussions of having everything be instantly gratifying or instantly available. It's not good or bad in and of itself. You can't say something that has no living properties is "good" or "bad." It needs to be used in the right way, though. The music industry is a perfect example. Pro Tools is not bad: It's people's inability to say "no" when they're using Pro Tools that is. It's their inability to not correct one vocal which turns into ten vocals, 20 guitar parts and 50 tom hits and destroys all of the soul that would've ever been in their records. It's about being bombarded with options constantly and not being able to filter through the bullshit, so to speak, and cut to the core of it.

Courtesy of Shockhound

In Sickness and In Health.

In our age of complete digitalization, its hard to think of anything that we can not do online. Conventionally, our personal health and well-being was reserved for the knowledge and prestige of the family physician. This trust, along with most of our actions, has shifted from the physical world to the digital as we type our ails and worries into a search engines to see what we may suffering from. This role of mediation (a key point raised by Latour in Wyatt et al.) is nothing new, it is what GP’s and nurses have been doing for centuries. But by introducing the internet as a trusted mediator, a rivalry between reverent and legitimate power has ignited.

Through the internet, we witness the rise of the medicine 2.0 and individualism through new source of both information & misinformation and spaces of research as detailed by Leong. The control of power has shifted; responsibility has stayed with the individual however the concern is now communal. The drastic changes in legislation and public opinion on smoking in Australia exemplifies this. In an attempt to regain the loose reins, you find new systems of management and administration in the from of websites and forums which aid the shift of power from public to private. In particular, government administrated websites that provide information on a range of health issues, including illicit drugs, in a responsible and proactive manner. By presenting facts in public forum, the internet aids in dispelling myths while assisting users to make informed decisions.

However, there remains the darker side to this 24/7 digital pharmacy as Neilson and Barratt discuss. The internet instantly oversteps the professional administration of products and treatments, delivering them directly to the hands of mere cyberchondriacs, to borrow Lewis’ terminology, full blown addicts or the curious consumer. They go on to raise the question of online monitoring, alluding that technology helps slay the monster it created.

When using the popular WebMD Symptom Checker, if the common symptoms of stress, headache and restless sleep are submitted, you are reassuringly diagnosed with either sunburn, dementia, porphyria or lymes disease. The only illness it fails classify is our obsessive attraction towards a complete and all consuming digital life.

Reshaping a culture around the digital revolution, countries now have to support their citizens who are affected by the new vices the internet provides. In Korea, a highly digitalized country, internet addiction is treated as a mental addiction. The video, Internet Addiction in China documents the move of communal interaction to individual digital obsession and the drastic treatment which is prescribed to rectify it.

References

Lewis, T. (2006). Seeking health information on the internet: lifestyle choice or bad attack of cyberchondria? Media, Culture & Society, volume 28, issue 4: 521-539.

Nielsen, S. and Barratt, M. J. (2009). Prescription Drug Misuse: Is Technology Friend or Foe? In Drug and Alcohol Review, volume 28: 81-86.

Wyatt, S., Harris, R. and Wathen, N. (2008). The Go-Betweens: Health, Technology and Info(r)mediation. In Mediating Health Information: The Go-Betweens in a Changing Socio-Technical Landscape. Sally Wyatt, Nadine Wathen and Roma Harris (eds), pp. 1-12. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Frankensteins Digital Monster

Splicing and growing one segment of media off another has led to many grotesque forms of new social media, all which aspire to the idea of ‘subverting and profiting’ off the ignorant. The readings from both Dezure and Gill focus on two abstract communities of new media ‘employees’; the creative Dutch creators of digital content and the ignorant, digital slaves in order to tear down the obscure perceptions held about the profession.

Leong is right in acknowledging that while excitement and wonder shroud this transient enterprise known as new media, there remains a sense of obscurity and unspoken trepidation. This is best expressed by Hilda, a respondent in Gill’s research, who states “new media does not have a tradition...that is why it is open ...It’s still not finished’. Due to the nature of the beast, it never will be. The notion of ‘compulsory sociality’ some practitioners uphold is a complete antithesis of the ‘digital slaves’ Ziltran uncovers who are subverted by the to the glow of a screen and menial reward in a presentation that opened my eyes to the extent of digital deceit.

Dezure’s documented fear exposes how digitalization spells death for those who reluctant of change. The fear that people will loose jobs, that industries will perish and convention will fall are not future concerns, but past events. Dezure’s reading appears too out of touch to see that while many traditional aspects of media and society have changed, they have not disappeared altogether. They exist as transformed media; as emergent formats.

References

Deuze, M. (2009). The people formerly known as the Employers. Journalism, Vol. 10, issue 3, pp. 315-318.

Gill, R. (2007). Informality is the New Black. In Technobohemians or the new Cybertariat? New Media work in Amsterdam a decade after the web. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures: 24-30 & 38-43.

Zittrain, J. (2009). Minds for Sale. 16 November. (accessed April 2, 2010).