Brilliantly boring
A website that shows a large piece of cheese as it (very slowly) matures is getting thousands of hits a day. What is it about dull- as-ditchwater webcam footage that can be so strangely gripping? Oliver Burkeman dissects the cult of banality on the net while Alexandra Topping picks some of the classics of the genre
Tuesday April 3, 2007
The Guardian
Something strange and slightly troubling begins to happen when you spend more than about two minutes watching Cheddarvision, the much-publicised website set up by the cheesemaker Tom Calver, which broadcasts live footage of a single 44lb truckle of cheddar as it imperceptibly matures. First, unsurprisingly, you feel bored and irritable. Then, after a while, and without really meaning to, you slip into a peaceful, meditative, quasi-hypnotic state. You start to breathe more deeply. Peripheral distractions - traffic noise, ringing telephones - fall away. There is you, and there is the cheese. Nothing more. If something should actually happen to the cheese while you're in this state of mind - every week, the cheese is turned over; on one occasion, the label fell off and had to be replaced - it has an impact utterly disproportionate to the event. It is inexplicably hilarious; astonishing; gasp-inducing. Then the drama subsides, and once again, it's just you and the cheese - and, depending on the time of day, perhaps tens of thousands of other people, scattered across the planet, for whom no other concern is more pressing in their lives, right at this very moment, than to stare at cheddar.
It is generally agreed that we are more bored today than ever before. Some surveys put the percentage of people who yearn for more novelty in their lives at around 70% and rising. As the scholar Lars Svendsen explains in his book, A Philosophy of Boredom, until at least the 17th century being bored was an elite privilege, bragged about by princes and the nobility. The paradox is that boredom seems to have become democratised in exact proportion to the explosion of reasons not to be bored: books, affordable international travel, and the mass media, for a start. And here is an even stranger paradox: in the age of the internet, when the average person has access to vastly more genuinely fascinating information than at any point in history, what are the sites that consistently achieve cult status, from the birth of the web up to the present day? The boring ones. A ripening cheese. A coffee pot in a Cambridge University computer lab (the first webcam, and now a dusty artefact of online history). A camera trained on a street in a Scottish village where nothing ever happens. And I do mean nothing: so little, in fact, that it would be more interesting to watch paint dry - which, incidentally, you can also do via the web, at watching-paint-dry.com.
Some incredibly boring websites, it's true, hold the promise of sporadic but genuine excitement - a webcam trained on the US-Mexican border might conceivably show an immigrant crossing it illegally; the webcam trained on Mount St Helens might show it erupting. Even the Virtual Holmfirth webcam, positioned to broadcast a live view of events taking place on the pavement between Sid's Cafe and the parish church, might catch a West Yorkshire youth engaged in antisocial behaviour. (If that ever happened, by the way, we would probably identify the epidemic of boredom as the cause of the antisocial behaviour.)
Just as frequently, though, boredom seems to be the very point of a boring website - as if we truly appreciate the quiet, uncomplicated space of a few moments spent watching, say, a nest full of eagle eggs that are not going to be hatching any time soon. Suddenly, it becomes a little easier to understand why people go trainspotting.
Steven Johnson, in his book Everything Bad Is Good for You, advances the thesis that our attention spans are actually getting longer, and that popular culture is making us smarter. Feature films, he points out, last longer than they ever did. Computer games, along with many TV drama series, require far more sustained cognitive engagement than was needed in the purported golden age of childhood. Is it possible that we are becoming more patient, too? After all, which is the truly more shocking thing about Channel 4's Big Brother: that it becomes a freakshow of racism and psychological dysfunction when condensed into a half-hour broadcast? Or that there is actually a market, however small by comparison, for hour after unbroken hour of footage from the Big Brother house, broadcast on the digital channel E4, where absolutely nothing occurs? In an information-saturated society, writes the sociologist Orrin Klapp, "we suffer a lag, in which the slow horse of meaning is unable to keep up with the fast horse of mere information". It would be nice to believe dull websites are popular because they are a rebellion against overload - a space for our slow horses to graze.
Except for one problem. The truth is that we all know how the web exerts a mesmerising power of distraction, somehow absorbing our boredom without really curing it. This is what we mean when we say that web-surfing is addictive. Big Brother has this effect, too: you don't feel bored while you're watching it, but afterwards, you still wish you hadn't. The fact that you just spent 10 minutes staring at a decomposing compost heap - as you could, until recently, at a website operated from the Sussex village of Horsted Keynes - does not automatically mean that you really wanted to, nor that it was good for you to do so. True, it's possible that you watched the compost decompose with a deep appreciation for the ever-advancing natural cycles of life and death. Then again, maybe you were just bored. Maybe you had spent half the morning staring listlessly at your computer screen, and were desperate for any novelty - even the novelty of someone putting something so incredibly dull on the internet.
I could go on. But it would only get boring. And besides, I have a cheese to watch.
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