Creation and Consumption of Experience

The ideas of media and engagement are abstractions that let us talk about the world in experiential terms. We can think of them as the "ingredients" of perceived Reality. You can appreciate this if you consider that media that is not engaged is not experienced and that, in the absence of media, there is nothing to experience.

Media is any part of Reality susceptible of being engaged, by means of attention or action, to obtain an experience. Essay / Ways and Means to Deliver Experiences

In other words, a medium "affords" engagement. Engagement is central to understanding experience because experience is the outcome of engaging media. If you cannot engage it, you cannot experience it. The realm of possible engagement between a subject and a medium consists of the "action possibilities" afforded by the medium.

You can think of these affordances as "ways to engage" the medium. It's the nature of the medium in relation to the subject which determines what engagement is possible and gives rise to a "behavior space" by way of its helpfulness, characteristics, properties, and conduciveness. We can express a behavior space in its simplest possible terms using these ideas. Consider the following simplification:

There's two general ways in which you may engage a medium. The first one happens when you lay your senses on it, you can call it "attention". It's the simplest form of engagement, mere contemplation. When you look at someone's face or when you focus on a song to understand the lyrics you are using attentional engagement.

You can call ‘attentional engagement’ any form of engagement that consists purely of attention (e.g., visual, auditory, mental). Attentional engagement produces experiences that result from contemplating aspects of Reality and it is what people use to consume experiences offered by media like TV, music, film, books, and performances (e.g., sports, a lecture).)) Essay / Ways and Means to Deliver Experiences

Some media allow only attentional engagement. For example consider your experience of the moon in the sky – you cannot touch it or smell it. The same happens with your experience of a movie or a symphony, you cannot engage them except through attention (the case of mimesis is a caveat). On the other hand, there's media that allows engagement beyond attention, like wine.

When you're trying new wine, the experience develops by starting somewhere and going someplace else. At a wine shop, for example, your experience with any bottle starts when you lay eyes on it. The experience develops further when you buy the bottle and take it home. At home, the experience unfolds as you pull the cork and pour yourself a glass, culminating with the taste the wine leaves in your mouth.

There's a sense of completion in this journey that develops as you engage the wine in increasingly intimate ways. There's a structure to it, it comes in "stages" or layers that reveal new aspects and possibilities for engagement. In this construction, attentional engagement constitutes a first stage of appreciation, with further stages revealed by "higher" forms of engagement – engagement beyond attention.

As if it were a scaffold, all other engagement is built on top of attention. You could call engagement that falls in this category ‘higher engagement’. Higher engagement produces experiences that result from acting upon an aspect of Reality (as compared to just paying attention to it). It is the type of engagement people use to experiences things like throwing a ball, holding a conversation, driving a car, or assembling Ikea furniture.)) Essay / Ways and Means to Deliver Experiences

Higher engagement comprehends the world of actions and behavior and it's a way to experience 'more' of a medium. Higher engagement gives us a richer experience that unlocks the value of a medium by revealing its felt qualities. Think, how pleasing is a pizza that you can't eat? How useful is a car that you can't ride? How good is a world that you can only contemplate?

Engagement allows people to "consume" experiences. When you watch a film or have dinner at a restaurant you are consuming an experience. To consume any experience you require an appropriate mix of media and engagement. Consider these examples:

• Want to drink coffee? You require media in the form of coffee and engagement in the form of drinking.

• Want to experience a roadtrip? You need media in the form of a vehicle and engagement in the form of driving.

• Want to experience a Broadway show? You need media in the form of a stage, performers, lights, and music and engagement in the form of watching and listening.

In addition to engagement coming from you, consuming certain experiences also requires that you be engaged by the medium:

• For your experience of the Broadway show to be possible, you need engagement from the performers in the form of dancing and singing.

• You want to experience a massage? You need media in the form of a masseuse or a massaging device and engagement from the medium in the form of massaging.

When you decide to seek an experience, the challenge at hand is precisely this – producing the combination of media and engagement that enable it. No experience comes free, they all require effort because there is media and engagement to be produced. You can think of this effort simply as "production" or "creation". Another way to think about this effort is as a "journey":

An essential condition for a destination to be reachable is that there must be a path that leads to it. Just as people cannot simply teleport to a place, you cannot achieve a goal you consider worthwhile just by thinking of it. Like their physical counterparts, reaching an experiential destination necessitates a path, a ‘set of experiences’ you must go through before and in order to attain the experience we are seeking.)) Essay / Assessments of Value in Everyday Life

The production journey of an experience can be very varied. You can procure any required media from either the environment, from a third party, or by creating it yourself. On the other hand, any required engagement can be contributed either by you, by the medium, or a combination of both. The effort of mustering this mix of media/engagement constitutes the "experiential cost" of consuming the experience. In other words:

Clearly, you may want to consume an experience without bearing the experiential costs of producing it. It's not unreasonable, say, to want to drink a coffee without brewing the coffee yourself. The logic is that people want to devote their time and energy to have the experiences they care about having. That is why we rely on third-parties to furnish many of the experiences we consume. Our lives would be unrecognizably burdensome if we had to create them all from scratch, like those of people in early agricultural societies.

People have a strong incentive to delegate creation of experiences because production is burdensome. In most experiences, the production effort is "friction", an experiential cost to be avoided. What is more, lots of experiences we consume in the everyday we simply cannot fully produce ourselves. Because you may be able to brew your own coffee, but how about building a car or coding a smartphone app? It is by delegating production to the fittest and most resourceful that we have access to a rich marketplace with options and experiences we wouldn't have otherwise.

In a way, our market economy provides the incentives to consume experiences without creating them. The logic of the market makes an active suggestion, that the value of an experience is in consuming it, not in creating it. There is something about the human way of experience that appears to validate this logic. That's why we deputize other people to do things for us in exchange for money. In the market economy we devised a dynamic where people can almost certainly find someone else to carry the burdens of delivering the experiences they want to consume.

The modern economy is perhaps the grandest manifestation of humankind's natural drive to improve their experience. The value people see in avoiding certain experiences and having certain others is the value everyone is looking for. It is also the one we have learned to deliver and trade with others. Who would have thought? What started as an individual game of survival became a dynamic where we all make ends meet by helping each other experience more of what we want and less of what we don't.)) Essay / The Experiential Nature of Value

In a market setting, the act of consumption is decoupled from creative activities. What happens instead is a "purchase" or delegation of production. Under the logic that such delegation makes life more livable, people in market economies focus their creative energies on the very activities that finance their ability to consume. The incentives to build purchasing power are such that people are induced into creating experiences for others – for a customer, a supervisor, an audience – but never for themselves. Downtime becomes a luxury. Hobbies turn frivolous. By making creation-for-the-self utterly unnecessary, the market compels people into paid activities at the expense of other meaningful dynamics.

In a consumer economy, experiences are created by proxy. Production is centralized into private companies which divide every value chain into "segments" for the sake of control. These segments don't create anything by themselves, they are pieces in a puzzle to deliver a product or service demanded by consumers. At work, people are assigned to one or a few of these process-segments, the execution of which brings no satisfaction on its own. The routine is unrewarding enough that people expect monetary compensation in exchange for enduring it, money they use to fuel their own consumption, ultimately generating the incentives for everyone else to jump on similar treadmills.

For those graced with rents and money, the ease and convenience of the marketplace makes it possible to live a life without burden. The market economy liberates wealthy people from the troubles of creation almost entirely because it retools the lives of almost everybody else to create and produce in surplus. By engaging in creation without personal purpose and the only purpose served is consumption itself, we become – in strict sense – a consumer society.

It is worth noting that the consumer society emerges naturally and it's not an outcome designed in secret rooms. It is people's fundamental drive to improve their experience that feeds the logic of the market.

Just like people are willing to pay for a better travel experience, people exhibit a willingness to pay for solutions that reduce friction in other aspects of life. In fact, a large portion of the economy is devoted to this. It's our collective desire to keep life livable which has given rise to markets that naturally form around people's most common and valuable goals. In these markets, firms and individuals offer "solutions" that help people deal with the frictions of life.)) Essay / Reducing Friction in Everyday Life

It's Zipf's Principle of Least Effort applied to behavior. Daniel Kahneman discussed it in his influential book "Thinking, Fast and Slow":

"A general 'law of least effort' applies to cognitive as well as physical exertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature." (p. 35)

The consumer society has had its critics ever since the 19th century, when people in Western societies started acknowledging themselves as consumers. There is simply something uncanny about it. One of the strongest criticisms is the degree to which it makes people co-dependent on the market for even the smallest things. In his paper "Consuming Life", renowned sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called it "trained incapacity":

"To become a consumer means to be dependent for one’s survival, even for keeping up simple daily routines, on the consumer market. It means to forget or fail to learn the skills of coping with life challenges, except the skill of seeking (and, hopefully, finding) the right object, service or counsel among the marketed commodities." (p. 25)

But the more profound criticism is that consumption has a way to make our lives 'fake': A life of consumption is a life of experiences designed and created by others. Consuming ready-made experiences ratifies a fear of taking a path of your own, as if looking for shelter from unpredictable outcomes. It betrays a need for adult supervision – to have someone standing by, ready to lend a hand and ready to take blame in case your experience goes wrong.

A life sanitized of creation-for-the-self is a life sanitized of risk, and experiencing risk has a way to make situations feel real. Bauman points it out while discussing the "pre-scripted" and "pre-packaged" experiences long offered by travel agencies:

"Tourists of the consumer society want their holidays to be escapes from daily routine – but also to be escapes from the hazards, confusions and uncertainties endemic to their daily life: the holidays they would gladly pay for should be predictable, calculable, efficient and controlled. The holiday companies, just like McDonald’s restaurants, are expected to provide, first of all, shelters of security and predictability. Adventures should be carefully planned to include a happy end, excitements sanitized and pollution-free, the ‘far away from everywhere’ must be located no more than a car-drive distance from shops and restaurants, wildernesses ought to have exits well mapped and signed. Wild beasts should be either tamed or locked in secure enclosures and snakes, if encountered, should have their poisonous venom removed. What makes the dreamed-of holidays alluring to seekers of adventures and strong emotions is the certainty (included in the package and protected by travel insurance) that someone, somewhere is fully aware of what is going on and how it is going to end, and so no shock will be ‘for real’, being an ‘experience of’ rather than the thing itself." (p. 26)

In many ways, a market economy improves lives by allowing people to consume experiences without complication. Decoupling consumption from creation, however, comes with troubles of its own. In particular, it has a way to erode the meaning people find in everyday activities, the cumulative effect of which comes in detriment of people's personal identities.

People craft their identity through behavior, through the experiences they choose to have. You can think of everyday behavior as a "performance" that gives people a story to tell, a narrative that informs both, the image other people have about them and the image they have about themselves. These narratives are a big part of what makes us different from each other. As behaviors, creation and consumption tell very different stories.

Creation is "storyful": When you produce an experience for yourself you go through a journey where you get to travel, think, plan, procure, work, among other things. Living this journey creates a story that fills the products of creation with meaning – the meal you cooked, the event you organized, or the house you built.

When you create something, you infuse it with a story that you can re-live by engaging the product again, a story that explains why you did it and informs what you might want to do next. Consumption is different. When you consume experiences in the marketplace, you deprive yourself of the creation journey. The story behind everything is compressed to “I want it, I buy it" – no sequence of events leading to the outcome, whim as the sole justification.

In other words, by freeing us of the things we have to do, the market takes away sources of meaning. You don’t only liberate yourself from complications, you forgo a proof-of-work that builds your identity, a void that is hard to fill with acts of consumption. Not so long ago, people's patterns of consumption and creation were almost predestined by tradition and circumstance. Karl Thompson summarizes this position in his sociology blog:

"(...) after World War II, universal access to higher education and social welfare benefits in Europe led to the erosion of traditional sources of identity provided by family, traditional authority, and work. Today, individuals are ‘free’ from the chains of external sources of identity, but this freedom comes at a price. Individuals are now compelled to give meaning to their lives without the certainty that they are making the right choice that in the past had come from tradition. Individuals are forced to be reflexive, to examine their own lives and to determine their own identities. In this context, consumption may be a useful vehicle for constructing a life narrative that gives focus and meaning to individuals."

An over-reliance on consumption disrupts life narratives and compels people to source those narratives externally. That is precisely the role that "identity" brands play in the market – serving as vessels of meaning that people can use to express themselves:

By embodying people's aspirations and desires, brands deliver experiences that resonate with consumers at a personal level. they offer internal alignment and validation because they are a means for people to express who they are and who they want to become. They also offer external validation because brands work as a recognizable signal of certain personal traits, goals, and mindsets which can be picked up by other people.)) Essay / The Role of Brands in the Commercialization of Experiences

How might you fix this? It’s not easy to go against an incentive structure that permeates everything. One possible way is for you to become acutely aware of your experience. By being conscious of the present moment you can safeguard it from meaninglessness and savor it for what it is. You can become guardian of your experience, curating a life by deciding which stories you want to live and which circumstances you want to embrace.

To do so, you need to "zoom out" one more time and let the whole moment become the medium. Once you grasp the moment whole, you can decide if you want to contemplate it or engage it further. If you are mindful of your consumption, you can use it as an instrument to focus on creating those experiences that really make life your own. The rise of Do It Yourself (DIY) culture and the so called "passion economy" are some of dynamics we're seeing in this direction.

Choosing your experience is picking the content of your life. When we consume, we live life like everyone else. When we create, we live it our own way. But knowing when to do each implies knowing oneself, perhaps at a level that we aren’t used to knowing ourselves. Do you know what is it that you want out of your days? Do you know how you want them to be like? The truth is there are no answers to these questions, except the ones you give yourself. The ultimate expression of freedom and volition may very well be deciding to look for answers.

Key / The Human Sense of Value

Notes / On the Aesthetic of Attention