I think the point here is that if we do anything mindlessly, we appear as zombies. Or, worse: we are zombies. We miss life. We let it happen rather than making it happen. Take, for example, what leckett1 writes:
"So what if they give a mindless stare? You expect someone to be all jolly and enthusiastic 45 minutes through an hour show? I can see what this photographer is trying to accomplish, but it really isn't very convincing. If you stare at anything for half an hour, I think you would be pretty mindless. Lets say your on a road trip...your bored of Gameboy, your book, and no one is talking cause you've been on the road for hours. You 'mindlessly' stare out the window because there is nothing else to do. I belive you would have the same expression here as on a TV?"
It's strange, but I will agree with itsbackfliptime: "I really don't think TV is the problem". I don't think TV is the problem. I think TV can accurately demostrate, for the sake of the argument, the effects of the problem. We cannot enunciate causes of problems through art--that's what we all might be trying to say--but through art, we can gage the effects of certain players or vessels which perpetuate and encourage developmental problems in children. Obviously the effects of the problem are far-reaching--we see this in these responses--but, yeah, the link in the initial post lacks "scientific evidence" and rightly so. There can be no scientific evidence for the effects of such a far-reaching problem.
It is hard to even consider the deeper problem here. We are so attached to our personal, systemic, cultural and institutional biases that we forget to really see the world. We forget to question it. We forget to pay attention. To some extent, every single response to this post demonstrates the inherant nature of this cultural and personal problem.
What is the problem? We accept mindlessness as normal; we accept it as reality. One might ask: "Why do we accept this as reality?" Most simply: because we are presented with this shape of reality. But is this actually real?
It is if we let it be real. It isn't going to be a problem if we don't see it as one. TV will not be a problem if we don't see it as one. And it isn't enough for these 13 photographs to conquer. What we must conquer is ourselves.
True mindfulness is often, at least in my case, experienced on the slopes. If I am not fully aware, fully attentive, I am missing the entire point of skiing or boarding. I miss it entirely. We ought to all be familiar with colloquial phrases such as "it isn't the destination that matters, but the journey" and other such statements--but how many of us actually believe this? How many of us can be so attentive when we experience life--or skiing--that we realize our true reality?
I might argue that the times we are most mindful, we are most able to forget. It seems possible, to me, that the times in which we are free from all of the distractions, all the noise, all the false reality of TV and video games and comic books and even novels, free even from our own worries, our thoughts, our attachments, are precisely the times of which we remember nothing except how we felt when we were doing it. I would say this feeling is a feeling of immense pleasure; of joy; of jubilation.
So perhaps these photographs cannot prove anything, but aesthetically and metarationally, they depict one of the many effects of refusing to be mindful in our lives.
