If I was given the chance to change things in my past, I would change basically one thing; not having spent so much time watching things on TV.
I no longer own any TV. In fact, I never bought a TV in my life. For a little while I was watching TV via my desktop with a small device and eventually I gave that up.
Until the moment that someone introduced YouTube to me. Et voila, I was back to my old habits of spectating.
I have watched a lot of movies, films, documentaries, fictional films, series, shows, discussions, debates, ceremonies, and this is the good version of the story. Because then on YouTube I have started watching everything I could discover. And since nowadays everything is on everything, I have literally exposed myself to everything, just by looking at it on a PC screen.
Although this is a story of myriads days of my life, which means this is about a significant part of my time which means this is a significant part of me, I do not regret so much the time spent. After all, in times, that was the best company I had, I also learned things; I practiced the oral listening of foreign languages, and I enriched my optical vocabulary for future travels.
But I do regret that I let this medium, starting from a terrestrial TV, to form me more decisively than real people and real circumstances of life.
My personal and family life has never been as these families that I lived with virtually over the screen, meeting them on a certain day of the week, at a specific time. My family life does not have a soundtrack to remind me of its identity, where I belong, who and what is my family.
My professional quests were to a degree inspired by the accomplishments of actors on a scripted narration. I definitely believed that I would thrive over my struggles as all of these fictional but realistically portrayed characters did.
My series ended, happily ever after in most cases, and above all with a huge dose of humour and love ending. Daily life in the meanwhile is flooded by other qualitative elements.
Also, now it is so normal that everyone looks upon a digital screen to watch things all the time, even while walking, jogging or sleeping.
We are now all forming our lives via a screen projection, specta..ting our future. A species of Homus Spectatus.
Our exaggerations may lead to a senseless reality of life, where we perceive only through seeing, although our senses are by nature interdependent. They need equally engaging opportunities to unravel their spectrum, resulting in the regeneration of our inner balance and personal equilibrium. Investing so much time in watching things, atrophies the rest of the senses and eventually propels apathy.
On a screen, what suffers more is the dimensions. None of the dimensions are present. Everything is on a quantum lapse.
Time, the huge amount of time that was required for the recording, the filming, the setting for filming, the time lapses, the editing, the recording of the voice over, the subtitles, the captions, and everything else, the raw sacrifice of personal time for the desired outcome, all is condensed in the few minutes of our visual outcome. And nothing in that can be perceived in the actual volume that it has. So many digital enhancements offer an artistic result but the more illustrious it seems the more virtual the representation probably ends being.
Films have always been my cheap ticket to a different world, a most needed getaway to other realities. Either because I was very lonely or because I didn’t have the means to do and see all that I wanted within my time. But the new norm of spectating is not just about filling in the lonely hours or experiencing more within our limited human lifespan.
The world has decided that seeing is going to be a dominant sense for the coming years. Within this new paradigm, we have at least four other senses to consider in our private, personal and interpersonal relation with communication. How, when, how much, where we will be watching is a paradigm that will change all of our future worlds.