AFK DEATH

Celandine Films

NOTHING QUESTIONS PRIORITIES LIKE DEATH, whether impending or passed, close or distant, singular or grouped. It sharpens up focus for a bit, asking pointedly what actually matters. For a bit, anyway. The duration of the effect varies as wildly as the circumstances. This enforced clarity and reassessment could go on for months, or merely moments. Still, when the end of all things is unambiguous, most people will at least reconsider their activities, regardless. Like the Moon, it is, from anyone's position, the same Moon. No way around it. Likewise, for everybody, sooner or later, it passes.

Shortly after David Bowie died, it occurred to me that I'd been seeing something for quite awhile, maybe for years, without previously noticing it, that is a note about this priorities effect. It has become important for those who typically conduct much of their socializing online to, in the event of a death, go online to tell everyone they'll be offline for awhile. In the first waves of loss, technologically based communication is one of the first things to go. Cutting back to the most important things, they unplug. Social media aren't top priority for their most critical human needs during those times. 
 

As I said, death will have that sort of effect, wiping out all but the most necessary functions or even thinking, but that unplugging behavior says something about our relationship with media. Mind you, the near parade of celebrity deaths in recent months -- weeks, even -- was populated primarily by relatively elderly people, and their unplugging families have been far beyond the demographic of those grew up online, so that's likely to figure quite a bit in prioritizing daily postings to cold shut down. I think. Maybe. Maybe...not entirely. Now that I'm conscious of this, I'll be keeping my eye out. The problem with that idea is someone younger would have to die. Well, that's no good, and it brings in a whole different set of variables, but would I likewise see their surviving relations post up "Please respect our privacy in this difficult time. We'll be offline for awhile" in all of their feeds? (I know, that's what "interns" are for...) What is it about unplugging that is, in a traumatic time, more important than staying in touch online? What does that do or prevent that it can't by keeping the screen lit?

Solo theatre writer/performer Dan Hoyle -- journalistic theatre, he calls it -- isn't nearly as old as Lemmy, Bowie, Maurice White, Meadowlark, Haskel Wexler, Wes Craven, Christopher Lee, B. B. King, Pratchett, Nimoy, Bob Elliott, Alan Rickman, Vilmos Zsigmond or... (sigh).. but in his current stage show "Each And Every Thing", he addresses our relationships with media past and present, posing some questions via an array of characters as well as himself. There's even a segment on a retreat in -- where else? -- Northern California called the Digital Detox. There's acknowledgement of the awkwardness of human interaction being offset by the handy distractions of mobile, as well as an admittedly romantic analysis of that forum of democratic discourse, the newspaper. Scenes in the Indian social institution of coffeehouse present different shapes of engagement and idleness in the noise. Is a binary on/off, plug/unplug radical switch from one mode to the other necessary or is integration possible? Just how should we prioritize our engagement normally? 

 

Portland Center Stage

Surely trauma isn't the only method by which we pose such questions. The notebook freezes, the phone bricks, the subway computer system borks, somebody dies after a long struggle with cancer... Seems like, just in our peripheral view, we already have some sense of what we genuinely care about, what we seriously think is just more clickbait. We may be our own worst trolls. Who's gotta die next before we'll starve the troll?