And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [8]
The BPS test consists of twenty-eight statements to which respondents answer true or false, with a point assessed for each boredom-aligned choice, e.g.:
1. It is easy for me to concentrate on my activities. [+1 for False.]
5. I am often trapped in situations where I have to do meaningless things. [+1 for True.]
25. Unless I am doing something exciting, even dangerous, I feel half-dead and dull. [+1 for True.]
Farmer and Sundberg found the average score to be roughly 10. My own score is 16, and indeed when I peruse the list of correct answers I feel as if I am scanning a psychological diagnosis of myself. I do find it hard to concentrate; I do find myself constantly trapped doing meaningless things; and half-dead or dull does not begin to describe how I feel when I lack a project that is adequately transgressive or, worse, find myself exiled somewhere among the slow-witted. I worry about other matters while I work (#2), and I find that time passes slowly (#3). I am bad at waiting patiently (#15), and in fact when I am forced to wait in line, I get restless (#17). Even for those questions to which I give the allegedly nonbored answer, I tend to feel I am forfeiting the points on some technicality. Yes, I do have “projects in mind, all the time” (#7)—so many that few of them ever get acted upon, precisely because my desperate craving for variety means that I am rarely satisfied for very long with even projects that are hypothetical. Yes, others do tend to say that I am a “creative or imaginative person” (#22), but honestly I think this is due to declining standards.
And no, I do not often find myself “at loose ends” (#4), sitting around doing nothing (#14), with “time on my hands” (#16), without “something to do or see to keep me interested” (#13). But such has been true for me only since the start of this viral decade, when my idle stretches have been erased by the grace of the Internet, with its soothingly fast and infinitely available distractions, engaging me for hours on end without assuaging my fundamental boredom in any way. In fact, I would advance the prediction that answers to these latter four questions have become meaningless in recent years, when all of our interactive technologies—video games and mobile devices as well as the web—have kept those of us most boredom-prone from generally thinking, as we might while watching TV, that we are “doing nothing,” even if in every practical sense we are doing precisely that. I fear I am ahead of the science, however, because I have been unable to find any study that either supports or undercuts this conjecture. I put the question to Richard Farmer, the lead author of the Boredom Proneness Scale, only to find that he had not done boredom research in many years. He had moved on to other topics. I did not ask him why, though I have the glimmer of a notion.
EXPERIMENT: THE MOB PROJECT
That May my boredom was especially acute, but none of the projects crowding around in my mind seemed feasible. I wanted to use e-mail to get people to come to some sort of show, where something surprising would happen, perhaps involving a fight; or an entire fake arts scene, maybe, some tight-knit band of fictitious young artists and writers who all lived together in a loft, and we would reel in journalists and would-be admirers eager to congratulate themselves for having discovered the next big thing. Both of these ideas seemed far too difficult. It was while ruminating on these two ideas, in the shower, that I realized I needed to make my idea lazier. I could use e-mail to gather an audience for a show, yes, but the point of the show should be no show at all: the e-mail would be straightforward about exactly what people would see, namely nothing but themselves, coming together for no reason at all. Such a project would work, I reflected, because it was meta, i.e., it was a self-conscious idea for a self-conscious culture, a promise to create something out of nothing. It was the perfect project for me.
During the week between the first MOB e-mail