Open Source Democracy | Page 4

complete with his own special effects?
Television programming communicates through stories and it
influences us through its seemingly magical capabilities. The
programmer creates a character we like and with whom we can identify.
As a series of plot developments bring that character into some kind of
danger, we follow him and within us a sense of tension arises.
This is what Aristotle called the rising arc of dramatic action. The
storyteller brings the character, and his audience, into as much danger
as we can tolerate before inventing a solution, the rescue, allowing us
all to breathe a big sigh of relief. Back in Aristotle's day, this solution
was called Deus ex machina (God from the machine). One of the Greek
gods would literally descend on a mechanism from the rafters and save
the day. In an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, the miraculous solution
might take the form of a new, super-powered laser gun. In a
commercial, the solution is, of course, the product being advertised.
TV commercials have honed this storytelling technique into the perfect
30-second package. A man is at work when his wife calls to tell him
she's crashed the car. The boss comes in to tell him he just lost a big
account, his bank statement shows he's in the red and his secretary quits.
Now his head hurts. We've followed the poor guy all the way up
Aristotle's arc of rising tension. We can feel the character's pain. What
can he do? He opens the top desk drawer and finds his bottle of Brand
A Pain Reliever and swallows the pills He swallows the pills while an
awe-inspiring hi-tech animation demonstrates the way the pill passes
through his body. He, and us, are released from our torture.
In this passive and mysterious medium, when we are brought into a
state of vicarious tension, we are more likely to swallow whichever pill
and accept whatever solution that the storyteller offers.

Interactivity: the birth of resistance
Interactive media changed this equation. Imagine if your father were
watching that aspirin commercial back in 1955 on his old console
television. Even if he suspected that he was watching a commercial
designed to put him in a state of anxiety, in order to change the channel
and remove himself from the externally imposed tension, he would
have to move the popcorn off his lap, pull up the lever on his recliner,
walk up to the television set and manually turn the dial. All that
amounts to a somewhat rebellious action for a bleary-eyed television
viewer. To sit through the rest of the commercial, however harrowing,
might cost him only a tiny quantity of human energy until the pills
come out of the drawer. The brain, being lazy, chooses the path of least
resistance and Dad sits through the whole commercial.
Flash forward to 1990. A kid with a remote control in his hand makes
the same mental calculation: an ounce of stress, or an infinitesimally
small quantity of human effort to move his finger an eighth of an inch
and he's free! The remote control gives viewers the power to remove
themselves from the storyteller's spell with almost no effort. Watch a
kid (or observe yourself) next time he channel surfs from program to
program. He's not changing the channel because he's bored, but he surfs
away when he senses that he's being put into an imposed state of
tension.
The remote control breaks down the what. It allows a viewer to
deconstruct the content of television media, and avoid falling under the
programmer's spell. If a viewer does get back around the dial to watch
the end of a program, he no longer has the same captivated orientation.
Kids with remotes aren't watching television, they are watching the
television (the physical machine) playing 'television', putting it through
its paces.
Just as the remote control allowed a generation to deconstruct the
content of television, the video game joystick demystified its
technology. Think back to the first time you ever saw a video game. It
was probably Pong, that primitive black and white depiction of a
ping-pong table, with a square on either side of the screen representing

the bat and a tiny white dot representing the ball. Now, remember the
exhilaration you felt at playing that game for the very first time. Was it
because you had always wanted an effective simulation of ping-pong?
Did you celebrate because you could practice without purchasing an
entire table and installing it in the basement? Of course not. You were
celebrating the simple ability to move the pixels on the screen for the
first time. It was a moment of revolution! The screen was no longer the
exclusive turf of the television broadcasters.
Thanks to the joystick, as well as the subsequent introduction of the
VCR and