Time is of the essence. Go back two posts or click
here if you forgot all about Temporal Dynamics. If not, just read on.
I want to say something about the media. And boredom. And time. And how everything connects, enhancing my theoretic field of Temporal Dynamics.
Go back some more posts and
listen to this, again. Really, try it. Take your time. Just click on the song, close your eyes and get into it. Do it.
What you just experienced was 6'32'' of highly structured time. Interesting or boring? Maybe you weren't able to pay enough attention to it since this is the internet and 6 minutes 32 seconds requires an almost excessive attention span in this medium. Meaning also that you decided to not listen to it at all because you already did that when I originally posted this. Or that you stopped listening after a couple minutes, seconds maybe. Right now, writing this and fighting for words, I feel a strong urge to go check my emails again, although I did exactly that a couple minutes ago. Thank God I don't have a facebook profile. Ok, so, on we go. Possible other reasons you were bored or distracted (a problem with or deficit in attention): You don't like that kind of music, probably don't like music at all. That would fall into the category of preference and has to do with seeking out of patterns. Maybe also with a whole lot of other stuff, that is too complicated to go into here (as if I knew). Let's say preference is an inclination to known (and somehow positively attributed) patterns. Those patterns arise, blablabla, socialization, chance events and such. Another reason for you having been bored with the piece of music might have been that you do not generally dislike that kind of music, but that you actually have no frame of reference whatsoever to process it, meaning there's no pattern recognition at all. When I went to see the world premiere of Stockhausen's complete
Sonntag aus Licht last month, I was generally interested in music, also of course interested in Stockhausen's music, but since I didn't know shit about or had ever heard anything by him before, I just didn't know what was going on. And this is the highpoint of structural compositioning! So I just didn't have the proper tools to break the music down into recognisable and coherent pieces of information. So what was more interesting to me were the accompanying performances and certain aspects of the presentation. The music as such (which was for sale for about 350,- € on 5 CDs) was rather boring to me. Again, because I couldn't parse it's components and structure due to lack of a frame of reference. But that would hardly ever happen with the Bright Eyes song.
So, music is highly structured time and depending on recognized patterns either a) worthwhile and interesting (preferred pattern), b) anathema (aversive pattern, which is also interesting but not worthwhile) or c) boring and indifferent (no pattern recognition or an all too familiar pattern that evokes no attention).
The same with movies (where time is structured down to 1/24th of a second), tv, literature, newspapers, the internet, this very blog that you are reading, all kinds of media that distribute information (and isn't that a defining characteristic of media?).
The Big Question is what are you paying attention to. How do you want to structure your time? I actually wanted to write something about
John Cage's 4'33'' (this is actually the most comprehensible version for internet use) and
Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five's famous line "Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time" but got no more time on my hands right now. (Actually, I got loads of time at my hands, but am now moving into a time-zone that's very differently structured.)
