The Kid is Positively Normal

Television--and I am not inventing gun powder here--has had a major effect on shaping the behavior, tastes, and preferences of societies and the individuals which make these societies, ever since it has invaded a major chunk of the houses of this planet.

With television, a soapy world was presented to us, to model ourselves according to its rules and regulations. Actors portrayed characters which were flat, bi-dimensional, and otherwise one sided: they were either good, bad, but never ugly.

Dynasty's Alexis Colby, Dallas' J.R., and Falcon Crest's Angela Channing were the despotic, bad-by-nature individuals who were out to ruin every member of the cast's life just for the fun of it, and would have certainly succeeded if it weren't for the presence of the 100% good, never in their life evil, characters of Blake Carrington (Dynasty), Bobby (Dallas), and Chase Channing (Falcon Crest).

Actors who have portrayed the above-mentioned "evil" characters have received death threats, and have had their families hassled, and even relocated their residences to flee angry fans' reactions. It was the world of make believe becoming reality. What started out as a fictive persona became so real in the eyes of the viewers that the illusions of the screen were transported to everyday life.

People tried to simplify their surroundings and the people inhabiting them by conditioning their lives according to the values television was offering--or perhaps even imposing on--them. Family members, living under the same roof, tried to label each other as simply good, bad, soft-hearted, despotic, or any other adjective as long as the label was one, and only one. Never did anyone carry a combination of labels.

Yet, and this is a fact, it was Joan Collins the actress--who played Alexis Colby on Dynasty--who reunited the cast for the final two episodes where her character would be humiliated and pay for all the bad deeds she had done throughout all the previous seasons. Indeed, there seemed to have been more complexity to Alexis Colby than what met the eye.

Then came the internet, with people exposing their daily lives, their fears and frustrations, hopes and dreams, and day-to-day problems onto a medium where any stranger could barge into and see. Websites were launched to celebrate the first tooth of the new baby boy, to share photos from trips to Hawaii or Egypt, to praise the lord, or mock the government, or for any reason more or less futile but nevertheless important in the eye of the webmaster.

And suddenly, people were complex again. They were not just good, bad; they were combinations of all possible adjectives. They were real again.

The standards that long dictated what a normal life was seemed to fade and the pre-established etiquette values displayed by television crumbled in front of people bragging that their magnolias were growing in the back garden, that their son was happily married with two children and living in Pasadena, that they backpacked through Europe with only a handful of dollars in their pockets. No one seemed to hide any daughter in Zimbabwe, who would mysteriously appear at the beginning of a season to boost the show's audience; no one was vicious, cruel and out to get his brothers, and frankly, no one had anything to do with oil wells except using the substance to fill in their tanks.

Guestbooks were filled with messages of how people's lives resembled each other even if countries apart. A truck driver from England agreed with one from Oklahoma that they both moved the world, even if the latter still insisted that Dolly's burgers were the best in the world.

I recently came into contact with a person currently residing in Kentucky. During the first few mails, he treated me as if I was some sort of an exotic species. Yet it wasn't long before he asked, "Were we separated at birth?" particularly after reading the analogy between our high school and university years, even if I had spent mine in Lebanon and he spent his in Ohio.

"Familiarity breeds contempt," goes the old saying. Then again, probably not. The new techniques of image retransmission over the internet via webcams brought an even larger boost to the normalization of people's perception of their own lives and that of others. Dinners were not cocktail parties every night, people did not wear designer clothes and changed four times a day, no one owned large corporate companies, balconies never seemed to hang over a frigid, enlarged photo of some large boulevard where cars never seemed to move. And speaking of cars, they did break down--incidentally, they were not Ferraris or Rolls Royces.

Dinner guests on the screens oddly resembled the viewers hosted in their own home, take-away food being eaten was some variant of something they had eaten before, there was no champagne and caviar scattered all over the place, and people seemed to sleep early because they had work to attend to the next morning. Just like any other person on this planet, except that now you knew it.

A few days before Christmas 1991, our chemistry teacher asked us to make a wish for the upcoming year. Mine was to have more friends. Being someone who saw a potential friend in any person I met, the number of my friends was limited to the students who were with me in class. The quantity of the people who might have been my friends increased tenfold when I joined a university whose population counted some five thousand individuals. A statistic indicates that 0.1% of humanity uses the internet, so by today's estimates the number is close to 60 millions--all of whom can be my friends.

John lives in Nevada, his two and a half year old grandson Austin is getting along just fine with his newly born sister, and I will sending him coins from Jordan to enhance his collection. In the meantime, he promised to send me something that had to do with "pop culture" from Las Vegas. Suddenly, the world is not enough.