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     Susan Linn:  “The children I see for therapy have neither guns nor swords nor media-linked action figures when we play together.  Nevertheless, they frequently and enthusiastically commit terrible acts of fantasy violence.  My puppets are routinely eaten, poisoned, starved, and abandoned.  These violent or cruel-seeming fantasies emerge, however, from the children themselves, from their own needs and experiences.  Fantasy play is a natural and constructive way for children not only to express their feelings but also to gain a sense of control over an often confusing and frightening world.

     “...child development specialists who have written extensively about children and violence, argue that the impetus for healthy adaptive war play -- or any kind of play with scary and/or violent themes -- should come from children themselves and not from the toys we give them or the media to which they are exposed.

     “Children listening to fairy tales are free to imagine, in however much detail they choose, the horror of a monster or a violent death.  Visual images, on the other hand, are much, much more powerful.  Besides, the bloody scenes washing over children in countless movies, videos, and television programs are not of their own making -- they are someone else’s vision and cannot be controlled.”

   from:  Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood  2004   p:106-108

     ...I’ve met with Susan Linn in her office at Judge Baker Children’s Center in Boston to personally discuss her work, and mine.  She is fighting ‘the good fight’.  But in the few short years since our 2004 meeting, children, play, imagination, indeed most all of real-life is now eagerly crushed into (self?) constructed visual imagery.  And when every playful fantasy (or truth) in life becomes not merely an image but an objectified presentation -- that is to say, flattened into performances of ‘thingness’ -- any human objection is rendered into irrelevance.  Hence we discover a world today with too little difference (distance/aura) between humanness, fantasy, representation, object, screen image, the quotidian and the sacred.

     ‘Thingness’ value increases as our old real devalues to something less than its image.  And so, I contend that growing concerns of violence, sexual perversion, celebrity worship, obesity, school drop-out rates, hypertension, etc., are not primarily caused by “the media”.  For these are but tangential symptoms of a darker nightmare, that being our growing appetite for the nonchalant objectification of all we see and know.  It’s not that we humans are any more fucked up, or are being fucked over more than ever before.  Rather, it is that something still darker happens when, through technological reality, we so eagerly turn ourselves into an image --into “thingness”-- which in turn begs us towards our own complete continuous consumption.  We are willfully and artfully commanding our own objectification without consequence.

     If you find any of the images in this video troubling, you too are most likely still viewing media through Susan Linn’s lens and fighting ‘the good fight’: seeing symptoms and effects instead of seeing first-hand.  I posit most youth will find little ‘wrong’ in this video montage.  In fact I’ll wager most youth will find this video funny, clever, cool, weird.  After all, the camera equally infantilizes everything before and behind the lens -- which measured by today’s technological lust-logic, includes most everyone.

     The righteous and exhausted ‘good fight’ of exposing objectionable media practices has been reduced to a educational parlour game.  It has gotten us nowhere.  And now it is simply too late.  The seduction of technological imaging and imagining is complete.  We have all become both puppets and puppeteers to our ubiquitous imaging technologies, and we love play-acting amongst all this ‘thingness’.  We prefer it, we embrace it, we consume it, and we produce it.  After all, pornography is not the sexual act, rather it is the illustration --the thingness-- of the sexual act.  And here, at least in this video, the pathway to thingness proceeds something along these lines:

  Act +camera +computer +internet +YouTube +computer +CNN

         +TV +computer +internet = totalizing objectification.

     And so, ours is a problem well beyond ‘good fight’ complaints of “the media” consuming kids.  Kids are simply being consumed exactly as we adults have always been consumed.  The nightmare is that today all of reality, offending and otherwise, must now be consummated with camera/screen representation: that final fulfilling gesture of totalizing objectification.  “Watch me do me” because sex (or violence, or life) with another human is no longer any different than sex acts with an object or its technological image, since all of it is a graven representation no longer carrying real consequence.  The nightmare lesson camera/screen life is teaching us: What is there to truly care about when all of actuality is bested through wanton perfectible mechanical manipulation?

     The clips I’ve collected in this video are not “someone else’s vision” as Susan Linn would submit, rather they are visions of our collective creation -- technological visions which we can control if we choose to do so.  Only we never do, even though we collectively maintain something must desperately remain sacred. 

     This video claims we have entered the “hostile takeover” of personhood...not simply childhood.  And respectfully in 2012, eight years on, it is intellectually naive to still think otherwise.  I hope Linn agrees.

Note:  If you think the camera/screen/thingness premise of this visual essay is silly, abstract, fear-mongering, or intellectual puffery, consider THIS or THIS.