Emma Marie Jones
WRITER & WRITER: Emma Marie Jones & Paul Dalla Rosa
Wherein Melbourne-based writers Paul Dalla Rosa and Emma Marie Jones – who are also friends in real life – talk about the collapsing system of academia, the infantilisation of culture, and the numbing effects of hyperreality.
PDR: … sometimes I want to watch a film, and I really love watching Éric Rohmer films, so I'll load one up and I'll have it ready to go, and then something stops me. I'll be like, no, then I'll just put on, you know, Keeping Up with the Kardashians.
EMJ: ...We're all being constantly primed to always choose the path of least resistance. And I mean, I think the other thing is that a lot of contemporary TV shows, movies, whatever, even art, is that it's actually designed for you to really only give it half of your attention. It's almost like the people who are making them say, we know you're actually looking at your phone so we've designed it for that, and then in moments where like there's a sound effect or something, you look up at the screen and absorb what's happening, and then you can drift back to your other screen.
PDR: Yeah, it's ambient.
EMJ: It's designed to allow you to keep half of your attention on something else because it assumes that's what you're doing already. And maybe you can't resist it because that's ultimately what you really want.