A Phenomenological Analysis of NOW Broadband Marketing on Lamma Island

Go to our Lamma Island placeblog at http://www.lamma.com.hk to find tons of interesting information about this Hong Kong island. This week's edition of the placeblog features my article on a clumsy marketing *blitz krieg* by PCCW, our local uncaring cable monopoly: go to http://www.lamma.com.hk, and scroll down past the "Five Years" celebration and a very good article on Belkin surge protectors.

Here is the article, a Phenomenological Analysis of NOW Broadband Marketing.

I've confirmed that the NOW broadband offer does not include BBC or Cartoon channel, only lame-ass CNN, Star World, HBO, an expense of spirit in a waste of shame (1) unredeemed by The Sopranos and a few other decent shows which I can buy later on DVD. It also includes two Chinese channels, one of which is apparently nothing but Jackie Chan boom boom kung fu fighting and the other probably for the old folks, with Guan Yin weeping under the sea. That's cool, but not enough.

"You know, I don't think there's any such thing as TV" - Laurie Anderson

"'See if there's anything good on...'. 'Why bother?'" - Robert Crumb, "Plunge into the Depths of Despair!", circa 1970

Seriously...I have been ruminating of late of the temporal and spatial phenomenology of television but not being able, yet, to make it through Husserl's Logical Investigations (hi Robert!) I may yet do naught more than reinvent a wheel.

The spatial phenomenology of TV was noted by me when TV entered my world as a lad. Yes, there are people amongst us who remember a time before TV. Sure, Britain had TV as early as 1939, but "the Telly" came as a sociocultural institution to Britain after it came to my land in 1954, and my South African chums tell me that they had no TV as late as 1975, the *apartheid* government not wanting the homeys to Get Ideas from American TV shows such as The Jeffersons, where egregious Yank blackfellows might talk back to whites.

In TV, we learn to bracket out an ovoid and reduce it to a rectangle. No clever-devil Yankee has successfully created a TV with an eye-shaped ovoid such that this could fill our eye and become the reality, meaning that our dismissal of our lifeworld (*Lebenswelt* (2) and a tip of the hat to my German friends) is something we rehearse continuously.

If as I think Husserl saw, emotional and cognitive cannot be disambiguated, then in watching TV we are continually practicing the act of tuning out and dismissal of part of lived reality.

(Do I reinvent the wheel? Did American anti-TV pundit Jerry Mander say this in the 1970s?)

Certainly, Modern Life is replete with what may be isomorphs of the act of tuning out. "Son, I would like to talk to you about the Playboy magazine I found in your room, and to give you advice about the peoplehood of the women therein, and also borrow it too". "Aw gee Dad I'm watching television".

"Honey, me Bunny, I need to talk about Us." "Why certainly, Darling Dora, my Mouse...wait a minute...wait a minute...pass it, pass it to Beckham you bloody handless git...aw haw hey we're the wee boys!"

"Ah'm not interested in the Blix team's investigation. Just tell me if we can put this turkey over and go to war against Iraq. Cut to da chase."

These are isomorphs of the spatial act. The temporal tuning occurs when we learn (cf Foucault so I don't have to) to structure our time into work and leisure (3).

We find the leisure segment further subdivided insofar as we retain an interest in High culture, whether by High culture you mean *Alles schön und gut* (4) e.g. that which is Improving, or getting High.

Thus, culture "vultures" of my acquaintance find that after watching BBC Shakespeare they want madder music and stronger wine, and switch over to the latest Reality show, even as a Russian count of the 19th century might start his evening at the ballet, fall to studying thighs and glimpses of Bolshoi buttocks, and end his evening for this reason amongst Cossacks and Gypsies who steal his money.

Count Tolstoy may have seen how "the evolution of productive relations" in Tsarist Russia, in increasing the smorgasbord of Choices available to the aristocratic man about town or *haute* bourgeois, had unstructured the leisure of his class so as to create a spiritual crisis (5).

The ceremony of innocence is drowned (6): we're "distracted from distraction by distraction" (7). 32, 64, 128, 256, 512 and 1,024 cable channels and we're basically in the same boat as the American couple of 1970, who could find "nothing good on" in Chicago of that year, even though they had American Choice of ABC, NBC, CBS, WGN (the local station with the Cubs) and Channel Eleven educational programming, the precursor of Public Television...yet to be debased by fund raising and only partially redeemed by The Teletubbies from Britain.

"'gain, 'gain, want watch 'gain" - The Teletubbies

This is warmed over, but I think nourishing, McLuhan. The REAL Marshall McLuhan was a critic of media and not its fan, and in The Mechanical Bride, he saw that the media (primarily film) of his day objectified people starting with the gals. But unlike most Anglo, American, Canadian philosophers, Marshall acknowledged the power and necessity of media: if we simply get rid of it we are not saved, but become instead Unabombers.

And our tranquil moment of disembarkation right here on this Isle of Cythera (8) is marred, I say. It is marred by desperate "students", Taliban who are made to wear yellow and black golf shirts in the heat and bully-ragged into wasting my time promising me BBC and Cartoon Network to make their numbers, a promise they could not keep.

Of course, my Pater also railed in this way.

"I think I see my father." "Where, my lord?" "In my mind's eye, Horatio". (9)

And my Grandfather also railed (and railed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also railed). (10) Grandfather railed against our constant watching, our grim and unsmiling childish suveillance, of The Three Stooges, because Grandfather had hired men like Moe, Larry and Curley, desperate men of the Depression when it wasn't funny to not have money to pay for a baby, poor little parisher aye that he be.

The PCCW infestation was a beachhead. Normally the scene at the ferry is curiously absent of the heraldry of corporations, the green and white of Starbucks and the red and white of Circle K, in their own way as frightening, as hegemonic, as double headed eagles in the forests of Bosnia. The black and yellow of the week just past was bad news.

I am most relieved that it will not take much will power to resist NOW cable since it doesn't have BBC or Cartoon Network.

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Annotations:

(1) Shakespeare, Sonnet 129: "An expense of spirit in a waste of shame/Is lust in action..."

(2) As far as I can tell, "Lebenswelt" is used in Phenomenology to refer to life as lived, not as partitioned for academic convenience by the professors and schoolmen, nor as commodified by the men of the market.

(3) Just kidding about Foucault. He is most readable and tres amusing. He teaches us that we have been schooled (nice work if you can get it, remedial education) to use our leisure to improve ourselves in ways that are socially useful, but that we cannot easily "stop the world". That is, I LIKE to run, AND it socializes me so that I can go to work and not leap overboard from that grim Ferry which carries across the waters of Lethe, to work.

(4) "Alles schön und gut" was used by German philosopher and public intellectual Theodore Wiesengrund Adorno to refer to what we are taught in school: about Higher things: that then must be remedied, whether by Sergeant Major or at Work, so that we don't expect more than our share.

(5) I was thinking of War and Peace, in which Pierre, disordered by his bastardy and the openness to him of aristocratic Russian society, finds his social life devolved and debased. This was Tolstoy's biography and it is continuous with life today.

(6) Most readers will know that "the ceremony of innocence is drowned" is good old Yeats in the Second Coming: "mere anarchy is unleashed upon the world."

(7) Slightly rarer, T. S. Eliot's 1930s Londoners are, in his Four Quartets, "driven from distraction to distraction by distraction" in a "twittering world" which he describes, using onomatopoeia, using the names of London suburbs: "Hampden, Clerkenwell and Putney": he foreshadows Malvina Reynolds, the American folksinger who in 1960 beheld Daly City as "little boxes, on the hill". Time has been kind to neither for the homes in my own Rolling Meadows were well-maintained and are excellent value today. Nonetheless, the idea of borrowing money to be suburban still fills me with horror.

(8) The Isle of Cythera was a French theme of the 18th century, as painted by Watteau, a pastoral in which the high-born lovers could return to Arcadia and, I'd hazard, get lucky. We are in a sense pastoral on Lamma, trying by means of the ferry to keep the world at bay: but as in Poussin, "et ego in Arcadia": for as the shepherds of Arcadia discover Death in the painting, we get cable.

(9) "I think I see my father." "Where, my lord?" "In my mind's eye, Horatio". Hamlet, of course.

(10) "And wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed". Allen Ginsberg was dead by September 11 yet in Howl he saw as in a prophetic vision "trees, clocks, radios, tons!" when "they [my relatives in New Jersey! Dead now! Lung cancer! Stress!] broke their backs lifting Moloch to heaven!"