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Aesthetic Apathy

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I’d like to push this idea that today’s writing has no coherent aesthetic direction. Central to this lack is a complex net of social, political, and technological developments. For me, the “Facebook Generation” I referenced in the title of my last post already carries a note of exhaustion and cliché. What exactly does it mean to be living in such a generation? Beyond the useless moralistic debates that swirl around social networking sites, I prefer to analyze them as embodiments of social trends, and not as social trends in and of themselves. An integral aspect of the social realities advanced through the explosion of Web 2.0 onto the scene is that people have become more distanced from reality.

We North Americans live in fevered times, but in many ways these times always seem to happen elsewhere—on the internet, on our computer screens, across the ocean…wherever. War today is a foreign concept for the majority of North Americans under a certain age. We’ve heard stories of the World Wars, Vietnam, Korea, etc. and against the backdrop of these horrors, the ongoing wars in the Middle East just don’t carry the same “we-need-to-keep-our-lights-off-at-night-because-the-Germans-are-coming-to-bomb-us” kind of terror. So, we’ve got problems—massive environmental disasters, fuel and water shortages, economic recessions—but these problems are so abstract and complex that it’s difficult to know how and why doing art is a valuable and necessary activity anymore.

Political apathy is a major part of this aesthetic apathy. Writing is expression; it depicts, slants, and unveils reality from multiple perspectives. Yet instead of exploring and expressing the many issues the world is faced with, more and more of us choose to simply ignore these issues in favour of activities that give us easy and immediate gratification (like clubbing and video games). In order for writing to have a coherent aesthetic direction, it has to recognize and respond to the social, political, and technological realities of the present moment.

George Orwell begins Why I Write by stating, “As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me” (11). WWII lent Orwell’s writing a tone of pronounced urgency that resulted in classics like Animal Farm and 1984. The Facebook Generation has not yet realized the shape of its urgency, and thus it lacks aesthetic direction in both content and in form.

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