The Russian text of this article sat on my desktop - in a Word file, of course - for nearly a year and a half. It accompanied me through most of Civil Procedure and my other 1L fall classes, then through Property and the like in the spring, through a blissful summer back in Moscow, and through last fall's marathon of interviews and too many courses - sitting there on my desktop all the while, the file name ("idiot box.doc") reminding me of things other than law school.
I've finally translated it, and some of its points - on the impoverishment of Russian TV under Putin and on the existence of (at least) "two Moscows" - still seem pretty relevant. And some of the "scandals" discussed in the piece should provide Russia-watchers with a chance to take a brief walk down memory lane, back to the summer-fall of 2005. I thought about footnoting some of them, but decided that linking would be enough.
All in all, I don't regret spending a couple of hours translating this, although I probably had better things to do and certainly had other things I should have been doing. Of course, I can't say I agree with all of the author's conclusions, and maybe not even with his main point. After all, I'm not one to criticize people for sitting in front of their computers - or their TV's - from dawn to dusk (or vice versa). Glass houses and all that.
“The Idiots’ Box” - Yurii Saprykin, Bol’shoi Gorod, 26 September 2005
In the city of Moscow, at least among the more active and employable portion of the population, watching television is just not something one does. Truth be told, ever since they shut down “Namedni,” it's really become a pointless activity. Among friends, when the subject of TV comes up, there will always be some eccentric who either doesn’t have a television at all or has one but hasn’t turned it on for five years. It’s considered especially chic to say, “Who’s that?” when someone like Andrei Malakhov is mentioned. Once I was relating to some colleagues a funny episode from the old show “Field of Wonders” (“Поле чудес”), and they looked at me like I had just turned into a crocodile.
There is, of course, another Moscow, where people drop quotations from TV ads into conversations; run home from work to catch the TV show “Clone”; and talk on the phone about Petrosyan’s latest jokes (actually, I wonder - does he have any new jokes?). One time I happened to be in an old Moscow communal apartment. I wasn’t surprised by the way of life there and by the smell in the kitchen – the one thing that really shocked me was that at ten o’clock on a Sunday morning, people were watching TV in all four rooms.
The Moscow that lives without TV looks upon the TV-watching Moscow not so much with condescension as with pity. And this is understandable – after all, these people are depriving themselves of a full-fledged life. Their entire perception of reality consists of Mikhail Leont’iev’s commentaries, topics covered on the “Domino Principle” talk show, and various “New Russian Grannies” (“Novye Russkie Babki”). Overall, television has replaced nature for them. “Poor, poor, people!” thinks the Moscow that has rid itself of television. And then it goes to check its friend-list.
Nowadays, any office in Moscow, from the editorial offices of the magazine “Among Us Girls” to the Presidential Administration, differs little from that ill-fated communal apartment. People who are nauseated by “House-2” drop everything to watch other people shave their legs, get loaded or try on new things. People who despise the show “Anshlag! Anshlag!” don’t miss a chance to showcase their wit by writing comments like “f***ing first” («первый нах») or “author, rite mor” («афтар, пеши исчо»). And this was worth turning off the television for?
LiveJournal (“ZheZhe”) and totalitarian TV appear outwardly to be direct opposites, but the ways they work are surprisingly similar. The thrill of watching someone else’s life; the pleasure of being in the middle of an uninterrupted information flow; the joy of "meeting" one’s favorite performers, be they Verka Serdiuchka or Mister Parker – these primal instincts can be exploited with equal effectiveness in both information spaces. ZheZhe plugs its heroes just as much as TV does, and already a huge number of people are starting to believe that there’s an important writer named Gorchev, or a successful band called Pled, or an awesome musical festival called Current Music. And whatever isn’t in ZheZhe doesn’t exist in real life either.
When someone suggested to journalist Valery Panyushkin that he start a ZheZhe blog, he supposedly replied, "Nabokov wrote that babblers are divided into paid ones and unpaid ones, and I think I’d rather be a paid one.” With all due respect, such a position in this day and age is hopeless atavism, something along the lines of a duelers’ code of honor. There are things more important than one’s Citibank payroll card, and the unpaid babblers know this quite well. When your every sneeze is answered by hundreds of people writing “bless you!” – you know, that really raises one’s self-esteem; just like how TV professionals love to talk about how mailbags full of letters arrive at their offices.
In spite of its apparent democratic spirit, ZheZhe is more and more structured along the lines of TV: there are the ratings leaders, hooked on the feeling of their own importance, and an amorphous mass following their every move. The leaders set the key items on the news agenda (see the Ivannikova case, the story about the NBP members getting beaten up, or the one about Minkin and Latynina getting pelted with tomatoes), and the masses approve (or disapprove) with a discordant rumble. And as for the idiocies of the rating leaders, well even the Malakhovs and the Solov’yovs of the world couldn’t dream of them. Just consider the (already paradigmatic) phrase about how “the mothers of Beslan should just have more children.” Having rid itself of one media drug, the active and employable Moscow immediately got hooked on another. And now everything we hated about television is seeping into ZheZhe: people are starting to dump compromising information (компромат) there and circulate rumors as provocations, campaigns collectively hounding this or that person seem to arise as if on their own (again, see the Ivannikova case or the discussion of the abovementioned Panyushkin’s article about the “logic of a rabid dog”) – the only thing missing – for now – is the commercials. Moreover, there are already several movies in production which will have marketing campaigns built on ZheZhe penetration, and that’s just the beginning. I may be exaggerating a bit: ZheZhe hardly resembles the alchemical basements of Ostankino [trans.: site of the Channel 1 studios], which Zavtra used to love writing about; ZheZhe has plenty of outstanding writers and plain old smart people. Although if you watch the Kul’tura channel, they put Lotman on, too.
But the clinical fact remains: thousands of people sit from morning to night as though glued to their screens, swallowing up some endless ZheZhe soup (“лытдыбр”). What a tragic fate – whatever media you give them, it all turns into television anyway.
