I don't know how much attention has been paid to the 'lightbulb wars' but in the past few months there have been a number of debates surrounding a 2007 law that essentially brings an end to old lightbulb technology and replaces it with newer, more energy efficent, longer lasting and slightly more expensive incandescent lightbulbs. This has touched a nerve, bringing up issues of government control and the like. Michele Bachmann for instance said, "The American people want less government intrusion into their lives, not more, and that includes staying out of their personal light-bulb choices"(there we go with the mythic 'american people' that politicians of all stripes claim to speak for!).
I don't really want to wade into that debate as much as use it as an access point for thinking about some shifting cultural moments. I was reading an interview with media ecologist Douglas Rushkoff on the always enlightening TNI, in which he used lightbulbs as a way of understanding how media functions,
"So it’s like the lightbulb is a media environment, right? You turn on the lightbulb, and you have a different environment because of that medium. But print is a media environment that encourages certain ways of looking at the world. Television changes us. Internet is a media environment. Somehow our media environment, combined with our economic environment, can really amplify one another’s effects in dangerous ways."
He also spoke about the important shift of the past few years which in his mind is a shift from futurism to what he terms presentism, that essentially we aren't a forward-looking society anymore (this could be a sign of the final end of modernity or not, but it would seem to signal a significant shift in the cultural psyche away from a dominant perspective rooted in the Enlightenment project). Elsewhere, Rushkoff has defined presentism as this,
"We shifted to this leaning forward futurist viewpoint to a “woah we’re here” presentism, it’s the shock of “Oh my gosh, we’re alive right now, but I’m not living for the now.”Nothing changes where you are right now, but we don’t think that way. The new thing that’s supposed to change our lives, when it doesn’t, we don’t know what to do."
Now, I think of two competing, or at least parallel, ideas about the present here. The one is the 'spiritual' discipline of being present in the world, and the idea that it is an important thing to be alive to the present moment, and we use any number of techniques, meditation, prayer and the like to condition ourselves to being 'in' the present moment. It's interesting to me that Rushkoff finds that living in the present, in the now, seems to eradicate the potential for change, and perhaps more importantly, challenges the idea that we are supposed to be changing. Presentism seems to be about media demands for us to paying more attention, and this partly seems to be a bit of a negative for Rushkoff and he goes on to posit that things like Asperger's and ADD are perhaps resistant mechanisms to the demand from media to be more attentive? The Sex Pistols line, 'no future' was going through my head whilst I was reading the article.
Again, I don't want to debate that as much as point out, that however we parse it, something is changing in the cultural psyche and that this is important. There are going to be any number of ideas about the present moment, but I do think Rushkoff is pointing out something important here--the path he takes with it has appeal and non-appeal for me--but nonetheless, there seems to be a tangible shift in the way we are processing the world around us and a certain inertia accompanies that--noone seems to know what to do, or is perhaps afraid to make a move. I can only apply this anecdotally to my own small worlds, that of a certain acedemia and the diverse church environs and economies that I inhabit--all of them characterized by inertia as the future-lean gives ways to presentism.
