Experience This

There was a time, I suppose, when certain words had meanings other than the trivial - when brilliant, for example, had to do with illumination, incandescence, intellectual fireworks, rather than with anything judged by the yawning classes to be mildly agreeable and/or slightly amusing.

In that Arcadian era, if ever it existed, the word experience presumably had to do with things that happened to people; things like battle, sex, having a child or gaining some new ability or expertise. An experience, in other words, was something out of the ordinary; something that left you different from what you were before.

Naturally, that is why the advertisers took it over. To the advertiser, which is to say the salesman, which is to say anyone who wants to have much chance in the world, the product must always be the sum of all virtues. There is no room for perspective in the salesman's philosophy. It is not enough to say of a deodorant that it will stop people fainting when the consumer raises their arm; the deodorant must be the cheapest, the most effective, the most astounding, the most seductive, and the most exquisitely, sinfully pleasurable in application that has ever been known to man, beast or supermodel. It must be an experience.

Nowadays, there are experiences waiting for us everywhere. An organism which used to be known and healthily mistrusted under the rubric car salesman has now mutated into a pusher of child-friendly, environmentally conscionable, utterly comfortable, stunningly beautiful, automotive experiences. Unfortunate film fanatics, such as the present writer, are urged to be content no longer with merely slumping in front of the television and taking in a DVD; we are urged, frogmarched, squalled and dazzled towards the home cinema experience.

There was a time, just possibly, when being shot at or going into space was an experience. These days, watching a digital video fake of someone else being shot at or going into space passes muster under the same name; as does watching a digital video fake of someone getting laid, I suppose.

Conversely, thanks to the shampoo experience and the public transport experience and the boiled sweet experience blaring and flashing at us from every corner of the universe, any real-life event that may actually happen to us becomes merely a recycling of advertisers' jargon. The experience is cheapened and trivialised even before it can be dismissed as "brilliant".

The result is a vicious cycle, whereby advertisers make inflated claims for the saleable excrement of modern life, which consumers eventually learn to disbelieve at a certain collateral cost to the language, which forces the advertisers to make yet more inflated claims and commit still more semantic rape. Eventually no word will mean anything very much except "good, innit" and "bad, innit", as has already happened in the political system. At which point we can all stop speaking and start communicating simply and directly, in the good old-fashioned way, by hitting each other with debris from the brilliant civilisation that has crumbled around our incomprehension-experienced ears.