Allston-Brighton Man

Allston-Brighton Man; or, When Virtual Worlds collide

I bike over the Mass Pike footbridge that connects Brighton to Allston twice a week. I’m usually listening to The Pixies or the Carter Family out of one earbud and traffic out of the other ear. This morning I passed a 20something with slicked back ear, an elaborately fake plastic/ivory umbrella handle, and both his Ipod earphones in. It struck me as I passed him, ”He’s Allston-Brighton man! Wonder what he’s listening to ? Oasis?” Then it occurred to me a second later, “Yeah, and I’m Brookline-Cambridge guy, equally predictable. Wonder if he guessed I was listening to the Carter family?” And of course below us on the Pike we probably were both walking over some Concord-Downtown lady, listening to NPR…”

My point is not that we’re cocooned, it’s that we actually are and aren’t at the same time. Like Leah Price’s “reader’s block” we’re all happy enough to insulate ourselves in whatever virtual community a cell phone, I pod or gameboy can provide us. But that doesn’t mean we’re not also out there in the real world, face to face, at the same time. The question is, then, what’s going on in our double worlds—how do we keep them both in focus?

For music, there’s one answer, I think—it colors my world without really interfering, because the sound seems completely inside my head, almost as if it were my thoughts. Without lyrics, it becomes (and I think Adam Smith made this point) an intense emotional experience that lacks any direct conduit, so that the emotions are attached to everything I experience without my quite being able to control the suture: you might call this the way that the virtual experience of music Crystallizes onto something verbal. With lyrics—even in German, if I know the back story!—it becomes more like the experience of having a narrative to contemplate (something like listening to NPR on the car radio). A story that keeps running through my head—does it implicate what I’m seeing in the outside world? Probably not directly, but it will certainly affect my mood when I meet someone, and affect the first things I want to talk about in what might be called the Crystallizing conversation (when everything I’ve had in mind precipitates out…)

A phone call is something else; so I guess would a video game be—I think I’ve walked down the street playing bubble wrap on the I Phone and that’s a particularly odd test of split consciousness….