And an iPod will never play fetch
What is it with people and their dogs these days?
There always have been devoted dogs and grateful, loving owners -- or, er, human companions. But something qualitatively new has come over this relationship. If you are older than, say, 35, you can't miss it. People are looking for a whole lot more in their dogs than they used to. And they're finding it.
I'm not talking about emotional-support dogs joining seeing-eye dogs on airplanes or the proliferation of dog shrinks, dog parks and dog gyms. These are just expressions of a need that people have come to feel more intensely over the last 20 years, a need that dogs are uniquely equipped to satisfy (cats being, as we all know, different): the need for an innocent relationship.
It's true that dogs always have been celebrated for their innocence. But the primary meaning of "innocence" was traditionally associated with virtue and vice, candor and deceit, fidelity and treachery. Only secondarily did it connote transparency, by which I mean an utter absence of reflexivity, an absence of self-image. Unlike you and me, dogs never obsess about their appearance or dwell on petty revenge fantasies. They are free from all that.
Nowadays, that second kind of innocence is what people see in their dogs, and it is something in which they invest enormous value for reasons they may only be dimly aware of. The innocence of dogs is contagious, you see. It seeps into your relationship with a dog.
It seeps into you.
What a relief! Because in this mediated age, our lives are saturated with representations that stimulate self-awareness -- with images and descriptions of ourselves, everyone we know and everything that matters to us, everything we were, everything we could be or should be. All the possibilities and actualities of being in the world are constantly before us. Media constitute our environment, from family photos as screensavers to each word and picture on every vertical surface in the city.
"Saturation" is the right word because it implies absorption, and that's where the effects of mediation take hold. It's not just the environment. Our minds are stocked with media entities too. Run the numbers. How many "things" in your mind are derived from media compared with, say, your great-grandfather? Ask yourself this: Is there anything you do that remains essentially unmediated, anything you don't experience reflexively through some representation of it?
